The Paradox 

of 

The World 




Oman 



Qass 
Book 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

C. F. Clay, Manager 
LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.C 4 




NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 
BOMBAY ] 

CALCUTTA J- MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 
MADRAS J 

TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF 

CANADA, Ltd. 
TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



THE PARADOX 

OF 

THE WORLD 

SERMONS 

BY 

JOHN OMAN, D.D. 



CAMBRIDGE - 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1921 



201, TNHIIA IYZYTE 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES . . i 

II A DYING CIVILISATION ... 15 

III GOD'S INSTRUMENT AND GOD'S 

AGENT 30 

IV REBUILDING 48 

V GOD'S IDEAL AND MAN'S REALITY 60 

VI THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD . . 73 

VII A PANACEA 89 

VIII A DISTRESSED MIND AND UN- 
TROUBLED HEART . . . 98 

IX THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD . no 

X THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 126 

XI GOD'S FAILURES .... 139 

XII THE PEACEMAKER AND THE PEACE- 
ABLE 155 

XIII THE MAN AND THE OCCASION . 168 

XIV WRONG WAITING FOR GOD . . 182 
XV YOUTH AND AGE .... 198 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XVI A NAME OF APPEARANCE AND 

A NAME OF REALITY ... 210 

XVII THE LENGTH AND BREVITY OF LIFE 224 

XVIII A MINISTRY OF SORROW ... 236 

XIX STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS . 247 

XX THE FELLOWSHIP AND THE GOSPEL 262 

XXI THE LAWS OF PRAYER ... 280 



I 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 

Matthew xvi. 3. 'Ye know how to discern the face of the heaven; but 
ye cannot discern the signs of the times.' 

Of the children of Issachar we are told in the Book 
of Chronicles that they had men of understanding 
of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. A 
tribe with this happy endowment among ourselves 
were greatly to be desired. We look to the tribe of 
the Churchmen or to the tribe of the Statesmen or 
to the tribe of the Pressmen; and when we fail to 
make discovery among any of them of this par- 
ticular gift of producing leaders, we consider the 
matter at an end. But there is an old saying, 'Like 
people, like priest/ which means, we must deserve 
good leaders, before we have a right to expect them. 
Issachar's striking success in this supremely valuable 
sphere of production cannot have been mere acci- 
dental fortune in the birth of genius, but must have 
been due to an unusual intentness in the whole tribe 
upon being rightly and not merely pleasantly guided. 
Real leaders are not discoverable till first we believe 
in that alone which can lead them, even in truth and 
righteousness. 

Great leaders are no doubt a gift of God, yet, 
even if God did send them, they can grow only on 



o. s. 



1 



2 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



the soil of the common wisdom. Great men may have 
extended powers of applying wisdom, but wisdom 
itself is not confined to genius specially endowed, 
for, unless it is a common possession, the con- 
spicuous manifestation of it will merely be rejected 
as conspicuous folly. 

In the Bible wisdom is the one genuine hall-mark 
of all really spiritual persons. To be spiritual is just 
to be able to penetrate to the inner meaning of events 
and know the right principles on which to judge 
them. The task no doubt is high, but, undertaken in 
the right way, it is not difficult. The moral weather, 
our Lord here says, is as easy to foretell as the 
material, did we with the same sincerity apply our 
experience to reading its signs. Failure is not due to 
lack of ability, learning or practical talent, but to bias 
of the will away from the determination to know what 
is to be, towards what we should like to be, and from 
patience in interpreting signs, towards a hasty re- 
sponse to mere impressions. 

I. It IS AN AFFAIR OF SINCERITY 

If we set out on our task as hypocrites whose 
purpose is to discover what they like and persuade 
themselves of what they wish to believe, and not as 
sincere persons with the simple resolve to know what 
God wills and the reality of the situation determines, 
a right result is hopeless from the beginning. 

Though the words 'Ye hypocrites' are not found 
in the correct text of Matthew, they are found in 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



3 



the corresponding passage of Luke, and, in Matthew, 
* a wicked and adulterous generation seeking after a 
sign ' has the same meaning. The point of the saying 
is that the sole difficulty in judging is the insincerity 
of our souls. Not as we are learned or astute or 
practical, but as we are sincere, have we discernment 
of the spiritual forces and fore-knowledge of their 
issues. 

Hypocrisies are of all shades, from conscious 
acting to unconscious bias, and have all kinds of 
manifestations, from ostentatious religious profes- 
sion to ostentatious superiority to all religion. The 
Pharisees prayed in public and robbed widows' 
houses, and with the same punctilious regard to 
legal form in both actions. Religious observances 
are not in such repute at present that temptation 
should lie in this particular direction. But oratory 
on social regeneration and the brotherhood of man, 
with merely rhetorical application to things at large, 
without affecting more than the barest legal recog- 
nition of their rights in dealings with actual people, 
does as well. Fluency on platforms and conspicuous- 
ness at demonstrations, unaccompanied by humble 
and unselfish service, will make just as impossible 
any discovery that a system may have private profit 
in it, yet be full of reasons for foreboding evil, as any 
kind of religious parade. 

Nor is this the only way of being far from sincerity. 

Our Lord said men sought to kill Him, not 
because they thought, what He said false, but be- 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



cause they knew it to be true. And for no other 
reason can anger be vehement and enduring. What 
we know to be false must seem to us too certain 
to fail of itself in the end for us to entertain towards 
it murderous hatred. But if we suspect that what 
we hate may be true, while this way of lynching 
may seem too crude, we shall be found in some 
way trying to kill the soul of its truth. The way 
may be less brutal without being less fatal. The 
reformer who means business can be silenced with- 
out either amending the evil he denounces or cutting 
his throat : for there are all kinds of ways of making 
it unhappy for your prophets when they refuse to 
prophesy smooth things to you. 

A great deal of human nature showed itself in 
Ahab, when, after insisting that Micaiah should 
tell him the whole naked truth, he put the prophet 
on bread and water of affliction for uttering anything 
so unpleasant. That old simple way of sending to 
prison now needs more troublesome formalities, 
even in these days when it is again more available. 
But there are other ways of prescribing to Micaiah's 
habit of mind discipline in diet. It may be a little 
more roundabout to starve him by only listening to 
sermons and reading books and applauding speeches 
and buying newspapers which echo our own pre- 
ferences and prejudices, and shunning all that de- 
clare naked, painful truth. But it is quite as effective. 

Thus the pulpit, the platform and the press are 
tuned by the same old method of food control — and 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



5 



the pulpit not least. The demand for smooth things 
has been vocal as well as insistent, and sometimes 
this has been directly backed, with an autocracy 
worthy of Ahab, by loss of place and pay. On the 
other side, it is made plain to men that, if they will 
show the consolations of Christ to abound, without 
insisting that they are chiefly for wounds received 
in spiritual conflict, and if they will esteem decent 
behaviour quite sufficient enduring of hardness, and 
stir no more than a sentimental feeling for those 
from whom God has withheld prosperity, which is 
to be regarded as the supreme mark of His esteem, 
and not make love all a matter of humble fellowship 
and measureless service, their pews will be filled, 
their circulation enormous, their popularity great, 
and their pay not altogether grudging. But if they, 
in Christ's name, insist that the world should be 
turned upside down and that, with the present 
idolatries, the sword will reach even to the life, so 
making religion searching and revolutionary and 
not wholly safe and easy and comforting, well, it 
is always possible to ignore them and to hope they 
will manage to exist long enough on bread and water 
of affliction to see the folly of their croaking as we 
return in health and triumph. In that mood also 
we are not of much value as prophets of our time 
or even for discovering men of understanding who 
know what Israel ought to do. 

But we may have a much higher devotion to truth, 
yet fail to read the signs of the times with utter 



6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



sincerity. You say, ' I will hear what God the Lord 
will speak/ and you are tolerant of those who say, 
He will speak peace to his people only if they do 
not turn again to folly. But is there not a quiet 
assumption that, in your own case, certain privileges 
at least must be exempt, and following Christ cannot 
have quite the old hard conditions or your cross ever 
prove an agony and not an ornament upon your 
shoulder ? 

Wherefore, none of us can altogether acquit our- 
selves of being so involved in an idolatrous and 
self-indulgent world that we are unable to read 
aright its signs. No right understanding of the 
troubled age on which we have fallen will be given 
us till we cease to measure God's reality by our 
liking and lay ourselves wholly open to be taught 
His purpose, however hostile to our desires, however 
hard for our ears to hear and our hearts to receive; 
and, not till then, can we have understanding of 
our times to know what our Israel ought to do. 

2. It IS AN AFFAIR OF SIGNS 

The first requirement of conscientiousness is to 
be earnest in discovering God's view. But there is 
a kind of conscientiousness which is satisfied with 
merely removing doubts about our own views. The 
perplexing and inadequate result would make us more 
distrustful of its guidance did we realise that only 
an earnestness rightly directed is truly conscientious. 
If the record which the Apostle bears to the Jews, 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 7 



that they have a zeal, but not according to knowledge, 
is praise, it is very faint praise, for a zeal unconcerned 
about discovering its true direction is not occupied 
in the patient search for reality, but is still a very 
disastrous kind of hypocrisy. 

True sincerity is not a mere emotional response to 
impressions, but puts all its mind, as well as all its 
heart, into interpreting signs. 

Have you ever seen an old fisherman studying 
the weather before committing his frail barque to 
the mercy of the sea ? I think of one who for seventy 
years had braved the Atlantic, of how his long- 
sighted grey eyes used to search the horizon on a 
doubtful morning, and of the long experience behind 
them by which he interpreted every wisp of cloud 
and every shimmer of sunshine. To go out in good 
weather was a necessity of daily bread; to be out in 
bad might mean a watery grave. Many he had 
known who, having misread the signs of the sky, 
had gone out and never returned. Superficial impres- 
sion, therefore, had no weight with him, but only 
the experience he had won at no less risk than his 
life, and which, misapplied, might cost the lives of 
others as well as his own. 

More often we interpret the signs of the time 
like children examining the sky on the morning of 
a picnic. Their one anxiety is to be allowed to go, 
and any brightness impresses them, and beyond 
imp-ession they do not travel. For that, nothing is 
more effective than the high and lurid red of the 



8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



dawn, and it leaves them no ear for the voice of 
experience which interprets it as the sign of foul 
weather. 

By this hasty response to mere impression, simple 
truth is miscalled simplicity, confident assertion 
knowledge, cleverness insight, pose strength, outward 
accord with accepted standards goodness, material 
success life's real triumph. 

Those who are thus guided by first impressions 
experience cannot teach. Nothing will alter their 
conviction that an easy prosperity, at least if won 
without absolute wrong-doing, is life's supreme 
security, and poverty, even strenuous poverty, its 
chief uncertainty and limitation. They may know 
many who are happy without wealth and many who 
have sold happiness for it, but it makes no impres- 
sion and raises no question. Still less do they ever 
reflect on how history tells us that scarcely ever, in 
the long history of the race, have the greatest and 
best ever lived in great abundance or ever found 
poverty a hindrance. 

Even when men turn from life's highest calls aid 
subject their souls to a dull routine worldliness for 
their families rather than for themselves, how often 
does their labour go astray! Excessive diligence in 
making for their children material provision proves 
the poorest substitute for being their true friend in 
learning wisdom and steadfastness of purpose and 
clear moral vision and a sense of responsibility and 
all that could make their time on earth safe and 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



blessed in noble service for lofty ends. Someone 
has called the young people who have been thus 
well equipped for self-indulgence and ill equipped 
for self-discipline the dangerous classes; and for those 
who could read aright, there was perhaps no more 
ominous sign of the time than the increase of their 
number by our long prosperity. Even now many are 
hoping against hope that the War will somehow end 
so that a luxurious prosperity may be more increased 
than ever before. 

If we, however, can discern the signs of the time 
at all, God meaneth not so, but has in store for 
most of us the discipline of fewer possessions and 
higher demands. So long as men are guided merely 
by what is visibly impressive, their judgment of 
things, and still more of men, becomes appallingly 
immediate and superficial. Especially the power is 
lost of distinguishing in work and character the 
calm glow of evening after the long day of labour 
and thought, from the crude and glaring red of 
morning while ignorance is still self-confident and 
character not yet proved. Cleverness serves for 
solid thinking, good form for moral insight, response 
to the influences around for fixed principle, and 
geniality of disposition for high character. Yet these 
are the grand distinctions which ultimately decide 
all destinies. The result is that men can no longer 
discriminate between first-hand experience and the 
multiplication of echoes. Thereupon they think the 
future can be decided by votes, whether cast for 



io THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



God's reality or against it, and measure prosperity 
by money and not by men, and seek to arrive by 
haste and not by patience. 

Though they may still be serious in seeking 
physicians for their bodies, their habit of mind 
betrays them even there into being more impressed 
by an agreeable bedside manner, than by knowledge 
and skill. But physicians for their souls they choose 
wholly by bedside manner and the sweetness of 
their physic, with positive disapprobation for the 
power to diagnose and heal the disease. There is 
no insight to discern prophets, who, because they 
will penetrate beyond impressions and interpret the 
signs of God's real purpose with the world, and, 
because they will only speak what they themselves 
have seen, enter life grey and sombre, with heavy 
mists of troubled thought and perplexed experience 
upon their souls and upon their speech. There is 
no eye to mark the upward movement which 
promises a wide heaven and a clear earth in time. 
Instead, cheap and fluent pleasantness of speech and 
pretty fancies, picturesque quotations for form, and 
clever manipulation of secondhand experience for 
substance are the acme of excellence. 

If only it glow, there is no concern to inquire 
whether it be with the evening red of grave 
eloquence, after serious reflection and deep experi- 
ence, or with the mere morning red of flashy 
rhetoric and confident assertion. Then the future 
is estimated by the hope of pleasure and reputation 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES n 

and possession, and the only forces that can be seen 
at work in the world are loud and masterful and of 
visible organisation; and men judge as we should 
judge a tree by its abundant leaf, without any eye 
for the unobtrusive stain which creeps up its trunk 
signifying death. The sign of a dying soul is hard 
selfishness, with all its ideals being eaten into by 
indulgence, and the signs of a dying society are 
blind rivalry for wealth, the extending stain of 
impurity, the need of shallow excitement and con- 
centration on fleeting pleasures. 

In the last resort the issue is religious. The true 
sign of the times is not our possessions, not even 
our doings, not even our visible moralities, but our 
faiths. If the certain future is according to God's 
purpose, we can only know it as we believe in the 
forces with which God works. 

The prophets saw ominous signs in crooked 
policies, public and private injustice, and still more 
in heartless luxury and unbridled lust and low 
pleasures which culminated in drunkenness. But, 
when they went to the root of the matter, they 
came to a religion which performed rituals, but did 
not humble and cleanse the soul; which would 
persuade God with gifts to give men their desires 
and be on their side, but did not do justice and 
love mercy and walk humbly with its God. The 
worst sign of a time is the absence of all religion, 
but the presence of a religion occupied with impres- 
sions and not with signs, with immediate success 



12 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



and not with the real faiths of the heart, is scarcely 
less ominous. 

In a Church, making the study of impressiveness 
its first concern, thinking, not in terms of a reverence 
which humbles the soul, but of a ritual which 
gratifies the senses, of a preaching which pleases 
the ear and stirs barren emotion without requiring 
a penitence which cleanses the heart and a love 
which claims the service of all we are and all we 
have, of institutions and numbers and prestige 
which require no going to Christ without the camp 
of social approval and accepted opinion, we have 
the most ominous of all forms of organised hypocrisy. 
Our Lord found it in His day, and thought it the 
mere lowering red of the morning, a portent of 
approaching tornado. When 'trampling God's courts' 
is mistaken for worship, absence of denial for living 
faith, outward decency of behaviour for goodness 
of the heart, timid regard for consequences and 
human disapproval for consecration to righteousness 
and reverence for the judgment of God, and un- 
questioning acceptance of tradition for the know- 
ledge of God, all will seem well to those who judge by 
impressions, and all will seem ominous of disaster 
to those who interpret the signs of the times. 

Already the morning red is dying out into foul 
weather. Even the low measure of religion which 
is embodied in customary worship, traditional faith 
and negative morality, is no longer being maintained. 
In the storm that is upon us, it is plain that all 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 



but the truth men have themselves seen and the 
good their own hearts have chosen is going by the 
board. The common idea of strengthening the 
things that remain is a more studied and organised 
appeal to impressiveness — vaster religious institu- 
tions, more united effort, more vehement affirmation, 
more elaborate ritual, more methodical moulding of 
the mind of the young, more systematised emotional 
appeal to the unthinking. But what will it do to 
avert the real spiritual disaster, which is also ominous 
of all other disasters, which is that, as the world 
is thought to be our sole good, Christianity is re- 
garded as a dead issue? What will save us except 
the resolute purpose to get down to our Lord's 
demand, to read the signs of our times simply by 
utter sincerity, and to affirm no truth we have not 
seen, to persuade to nothing of which we are not 
ourselves persuaded, and to trust no other appeal 
except the evidence of the truth itself to the minds 
that see it, and to offer no good except what our 
hearts have chosen and our lives are serving, and to 
offer it only on the same exclusive and austere con- 
ditions ? 

The morning red of impressiveness we cannot 
recover, or, if we did, it would only be a fitful 
glow, the forerunner of even fouler weather; and 
we can look forward to the promise of the calm after- 
glow only through a long day of earnest thought 
and steadfast patience and resolute purpose to hear 
only what God will speak, and of learning of His 



i 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 

ways by unswerving loyalty to His will. Religion 
has only one imperious demand — utter sincerity in 
our thinking and feeling and acting. The lack of it 
is the supreme sign of disaster, the presence of it 
the one promise of a right use of this life, as well 
as of any higher fulfilment of it in the life to come. 
But we are sincere only as we pass beyond all that 
merely impresses, to the signs of our real moral 
and spiritual state, to the signs of the supreme and 
final realities by which all our futures are ultimately 
determined. 



II 



A DYING CIVILISATION 

I Kings xix. 12. 'And after the fire a still small voice.' 

Xhe sublimity of this scene should impress us 
with its tremendous significance, but, as we watch 
the haggard solitary figure at the mouth of the cave, 
the shattered head of Horeb towering above him, 
and the desert stretching out dim and boundless 
and desolate before, and hear the rocks crash in 
tornado, and feel the earth quake in pent-up agony, 
and see the lightning wrap the world in flame, and 
shudder with awe as the tumult of nature changes 
to the sudden silence of the great waste places 
of the earth, our imagination is so filled with the 
spectacle that we may forget to ask what it meant 
for that lone watcher. 

Positive misunderstanding, moreover, is intro- 
duced by the translation of our text as 'a still small 
voice,* and especially by the accepted exposition of 
it both in preaching and poetry. The tumult in 
which God was not is taken to be the vehement 
methods of judgment, and in particular Elijah's 
violence with idolatry and the priests of Baal. The 
* still small voice,' in which God was, is then a 
declaration of the gentle ways of God and a prophecy 
of Him who was full of grace and truth. 

But even Christ's denunciation of an adulterous 



1 6 A DYING CIVILISATION 



generation, who corrupted religion by hypocrisy, 
could be heart-shaking as earthquake and scathing 
as lightning; and no one ever announced more 
terrible judgments. Besides, if this voice rebuked 
violence and promised gentleness, why should it be 
followed by the announcement of just such a terrible 
upheaval in human society as had passed over nature ? 
Why was Elijah to anoint Hazael to be king over 
Syria, and Jehu to be king over Israel, and Elisha 
to be prophet in his own room, that him who 
escaped from the sword of Hazael, Jehu should 
slay, and him who escaped from the sword of Jehu, 
Elisha should slay ? Instead of gentleness and rebuke 
of the spirit of judgment, the doom is so appalling 
that Elijah himself, for all his sternness, sought 
delay when he took the first step of calling Elisha, 
and Elisha wept in the streets of Damascus when 
he took the second by appointing the kingdom to 
Hazael. 

The seven thousand who have not bowed the 
knee to Baal are the one hope in the distress. They 
become the holy remnant from which is to spring 
a new nation, and then the servant of the Lord who 
is to be a light to lighten the Gentiles as well as the 
glory of Israel. But even their presence, though it 
assures hope at the end of the day, cannot avert 
judgment or do more than delay the blotting-out 
of civilisation. And it is this blotting-out which is 
predicted in the solemn stillness which follows the 
agony of nature. 



A DYING CIVILISATION 17 



The only doubtful word is that translated 'small/ 
Literally it means something beaten fine like dust, 
but it was also in common use for something thin 
like a veil. The rest is in no way doubtful. It is 
not a still voice, but a voice of silence. The silence 
itself speaks as when the heavens, which have no 
speech or language, declare the glory of God. The 
best commentary is the passage in Job, where 
Eliphaz says that, in visions of the night, a mysterious 
presence passed before his face, and a voice of 
silence — not a voice following silence, but the voice 
of the silence itself — said, Can man be pure before 
God who charges even His angels with folly? Our 
text, therefore, means a voice of a silence which 
either wrapped the world like a veil or fell upon it 
like dust on one vast desolation. In either case it 
means the arresting, solemn, dread stillness of the 
great waste-places. It speaks in the same language 
of nature as the tornado, the earthquake and the 
lightning. As they meant invasion, revolution and 
moral disaster, this typifies the ruined world which 
shall remain when the work, of which Hazael, Jehu 
and Elisha are but the beginnings, has reached its 
calamitous close. 

That the Lord was not in tempest, earthquake 
or fire, does not mean that they were contrary to 
His mind or apart from His purpose, or even that 
he did not command them into action, but only 
that the prophet could not yet hear in them the 
deliverance he expected, the satisfaction of His 



1 8 A DYING CIVILISATION 



longing for a purified religion and a regenerated 
society. That first spoke in the voice of the arresting 
silence which fell upon the lightning-riven masses 
of Horeb and the storm-driven sands of the far- 
stretching desert. This desolate stillness first uttered 
to his heart the hope that, as once the religion of 
Israel had been cleansed of idolatries and its society 
ordered on simple human relations in the wilderness, 
so it might be again. 

By invasion, insurrection and moral corruption 
the present civilisation would fall to ruin. Its worldly 
and selfish prosperity, which drowned every voice 
of the human heart except ambition and pride of 
place and love of pleasure and greed of gain and all- 
devouring lust, would cease; its worship, which 
debased religion to ceremonial and faith to super- 
stition, would sink into silence. Then, in that dread 
stillness of desolation, man would once again hear 
the deep divine voices in his own heart, love his 
neighbour in justice and kindness, and worship God 
in simplicity and humility. Then, too, above all, the 
seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal would come to their own, and in God's name 
rebuild a new and better world. 

This was the prophet's hope: and, without hope, 
he was not asked to do his work. But, so far is his 
resistance to evil from being rebuked, that he is 
ordered to begin an upheaval which would shake 
all false securities, burst all unreal bonds, and 
manifest the disaster of all corruptions. In spite of 



A DYING CIVILISATION 



the hope shining at the end, this way of the wilder- 
ness remained dark and terrible, a way before which 
even Elijah's high courage quailed and his stern 
heart melted. The silence of desolation, which fol- 
lowed tempest and earthquake and fire, meant the 
blotting out of civilisation by brutal wars of conquest, 
by national anarchies and by moral corruptions ; and 
no vision behind it of religious or social regeneration 
could change the awful doom of misery, captivity, 
slaughter, which overshadowed men and women and 
even little children. Beyond lay the vision of God's 
Holy Mountain where the ransomed of the Lord 
should walk and none hurt or destroy, but even that 
hope could not still the present agony which rent the 
heart of every prophet, till he cried 'O Lord, how 
long?' nor did it alter the terrible answer, 'Until 
cities be waste without inhabitants and houses with- 
out men, and the land become utterly waste.' 

In that voice of the silence of desolation can be 
heard the whole burden of Hebrew prophecy. Even 
Isaiah and Jeremiah, for all their far greater gifts 
of genius, are but followers and disciples of Elijah, 
and only the scope and splendour of their applica- 
tion obscures the extent to which they merely re- 
echo this message of the voices of the desert. 

Elijah, listening in trembling awe to this pause 
of the utter, lone silence of the waste, learned the 
measure of value which gave birth to all the prophets' 
thoughts of God as ruling in righteousness the armies 
of Heaven as well as the inhabitants of Earth. 



2 — 2 



2o A DYING CIVILISATION 



From it they learned that no interests compare with 
the interests of the soul, that every loss is gain upon 
which the soul can feed, and that earthly kingdoms 
are less than nothing and vanity when God's King- 
dom is at stake. Their sublime monotheism, with 
all its confidence in the wise omnipotent righteous 
sovereignty of the One God, is just the application 
of this discovery. God has ceased to be an idol to 
secure individual prosperity or a national deity to 
guarantee His people's security, and has become 
the director of all destinies and the measure of all 
good, for whose ends man might with profit suffer 
and die and the world with advantage be reduced 
to ruin and desolation. Though this message never 
ceases to be tremendous and appalling, all true 
thoughts, not only of God's righteous sovereignty, 
but of His patient wise love, spring from it. And, 
if it grow only on soil ploughed deep with the agony 
of men and nations, it bears, as no other plant, the 
fruit of eternal hope. 

This we see in all the prophets from Amos to 
Jeremiah. 

The work of Amos is so amazingly original, that 
it has been described as the most remarkable pheno- 
menon in the history of the human spirit, yet the 
heart of his message is just what Elijah saw at 
Horeb : and his continual reference to fire seems to 
show that he was not ignorant of his dependence. 
God will send His fire upon Syria, which is still to 
him the house of Hazael, and upon Israel and Judah 



A DYING CIVILISATION 21 



and all the nations round about. And fire means 
with Amos also the consuming power of the moral 
nature of things when ignored and defied. The 
present civilisation is doomed, and nothing in it 
more certainly than its religion of much ritual and 
little righteousness. God despises its feasts, has no 
delight in its solemn assemblies, and pays no re- 
gard to its sacrifices, which were never offered in 
the wilderness. 

This is his only reference to the wilderness, yet 
it is of deep significance, as it plainly hints that there 
alone lies the hope of a purified, sincere and neigh- 
bourly piety. But of the coming desolation which 
was to reduce religion to this simplicity, nowhere 
are there more terrible descriptions. There may even 
be a definite reference to the experience of Elijah 
in the demand for silence after the songs of the 
Temple have become howlings and the dead are 
too many and the living too few for the rites of 
burial. Even of the remnant he can only say that 
their wisdom is in silence, and that, if they hate the 
evil and love the good and establish judgment in 
the gate, it may be that God will be gracious unto 
them. The hymn of restoration at the close, when 
cities should be rebuilt and inhabited, and fields 
sown and the bread eaten, and vineyards and gardens 
planted and the wine drunk and the fruit enjoyed, 
is thought to be later, but, as it is a hope still limited 
to Israel, it may not; and, in any case, we cannot sup- 
pose that Amos, any more than Elijah, was asked 



22 A DYING CIVILISATION 



to prophesy mere desolation without some assurance 
that God's voice spoke in its silence, promising a 
purer religion and a regenerated society. 

Invasion and insurrection are for Amos, as for 
Elijah, the means of destruction. Yet they remain 
vague hints of slaughter and wasting and captivity 
and risings against the house of Jeroboam, the de- 
scendant of Jehu. Only when we come to the 
supreme destructive force, the nature of moral 
reality, have we a concreteness, an intensity, an 
inevitableness, without parallel. A nation in which 
lies are cherished and prophets silenced, the needy 
robbed and the meek oppressed, adultery flagrant 
and drunkenness rampant, luxury rapacious, recrea- 
tion frivolous and amusement the only serious pursuit, 
till nothing is left sacred, God calls to contend with 
fire not to be escaped in heaven or hell or the depths 
of the sea, till the land shall melt and its inhabitants 
mourn. 

In Hosea there is a still clearer conception that 
the goal is the wilderness. 'Behold, I will allure her 
and bring her into the wilderness, and speak com- 
fortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards 
from thence, and the Valley of Troubling for a door of 
hope.' Anarchy is already doing its destructive work 
within and the invader is thundering at the gate. 
But the inevitable still lies in the moral and spiritual 
forces. A nation sunk in idolatry, licentiousness, in- 
temperance, greed, pride and injustice, cannot abide. 

A great agony of sympathy possesses the heart 



A DYING CIVILISATION 23 



of the prophet. But comfort springs from the very 
depth of his woe, for the very agony in his own 
heart interprets the heart of God. 'In Him the 
fatherless findeth mercy/ 'His heart is turned 
within Him/ 'His compassions are kindled together/ 
He cannot finally give up His people. 

The message of Isaiah is not essentially different. 
Though the destruction of Judah is deferred, the 
present civilisation is doomed in every nation, And 
the powers before which it is to fall are still the 
same. First there is conquest. Assyria is at hand, a 
razor Judah herself has hired, which will shave her 
bare. Next there is anarchy. 'Children are their 
princes, and babes rule over them,' and the distress 
is so great that anyone with clothing is urged to be 
a ruler and take in hand to bring some order into 
the ruin. 

But the final, the unescapable cause of disaster 
is still that, however it be ignored or denied, the 
supreme reality is moral and spiritual. A nation 
cannot abide when religion degenerates into com- 
plicated ceremonial, trampling of God's courts, 
presenting vain oblations and calling solemn assem- 
blies, when the heart's best reverence is so material 
that it cannot rise above superstition and idolatry, 
when pride flaunts its luxury in the face of poverty, 
and wealth won by oppression is spent in strong 
drink and frivolous and licentious festivities. This is 
the all-consuming fire in which men shall be ' devoured 
like stubble and their blossom go up like dust/ 



24 A DYING CIVILISATION 



At the end lies still the discipline of the wilderness. 
The land is to be a place of briars and thorns where 
the sparse inhabitants hunt and dig and pasture 
their few cattle for the simplest livelihood. 

Yet in this stock of a felled tree, the holy remnant, 
as Isaiah names the seven thousand who have not 
bowed the knee to Baal, are the life out of which 
there will be a growth more spacious and glorious, 
an Israel of a faith and a righteousness which will 
show that great is the Holy One of Israel in the 
midst of her. 

Later there was a change to a larger, more 
gracious, more spiritual conception of the work of 
the holy remnant. From a mere seed from which 
might grow a renovated Israel, it came to be a re- 
deeming leaven in the whole world, through whom 
the knowledge of the Lord should cover the earth as 
the waters cover the sea, from whose pure and sincere 
worship would proceed the law which would establish 
perfect peace in perfect righteousness, not by any 
form of outward compulsion, but by the covenant 
of a new spirit within of truth and love. 

Even more pointedly and exclusively this message 
of the wilderness was the prophetic burden of 
Jeremiah; while, through him, the method of the 
remnant was still clearly conceived as service and 
sacrifice. 

Finally, under his influence, the remnant came to 
be later the Suffering Servant, whose work crowned 
the prophetic hope of the Old Testament and was the 



A DYING CIVILISATION 25 



supreme preparation for Him who came from the 
bosom of the Father to declare Him and establish 
among men the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The Old Testament has become in these days a 
real, an appallingly real book, and no part of it more 
concerns us than this central message of the silence 
of desolation. 

When there is no principle of righteousness to 
oppose to the brutal strength of invasion, no rule 
of duty and devotion to maintain civil order, no 
worship but of place and gain and pleasure to give 
regard for man made in God's image and reverence 
for the soul which is His breath in our mortal 
clay, the spirit is dead and only the pampered body 
remains and there is no need to ask, 

Shall worms inheritors of this excess 
Eat up thy charge? 

Then the only hope remaining is that 'the soul 
may live upon its servant's loss.' 

When the great gift of civilisation, so rich in 
its possibilities for higher thought and purer wor- 
ship, for gracious sympathies and helpful, brotherly 
human relations, is misused for obscuring the vital 
demands of religion, for enriching the rich and 
impoverishing the poor, for competition in which 
strength serves only selfish desire, and for a measure 
of values by wealth and not by worth and wisdom 
and goodness, there is no hope but in its destruction 
and a return to the solemn stillness of the wilderness 



26 A DYING CIVILISATION 



where men may hear, in the deeper voices of their 
own hearts, the call of the Divine Will of righteous- 
ness and love above them and of the sacred humanities 
around them. 

We have often said there are worse things than 
war; and, in spite of all these recent years have 
taught us of its horrors, it is still true that there 
are subjections and disloyalties worse than war. 
Yet war, not to bring nations to their senses that 
we may once again trust the securities of reason 
and righteousness, but to put each other in strait- 
waistcoats of annexations and armed suppressions 
and control of material resources, is only what the 
ancient peoples like Assyria attempted to do by 
humiliating subjection and crushing tribute and the 
removing of peoples. The result could only be once 
again to turn the world into a permanent Bedlam 
in which civilisation would end in mutual destruction. 

Nor could we save anything out of the ruin 
except by having in us a principle of reasonableness 
and righteousness and unselfish regard for human 
good which, by right of its own nature, could appeal 
against mad ambition and brutal aggression. 

With even more confidence we can say there are 
worse things than insurrection. Our own civil wars 
have won for us more permanent good than our 
many foreign wars : and even the chaos and weakness 
of Russia might be a cheap price for an enlightened 
and just and ordered freedom. Something of revo- 
lution, if not by arms, yet by other ways of anarchy, 



A DYING CIVILISATION 27 

every country in Europe may soon have to face. 
But again how much of our civilisation we can bring 
out of it will depend on the measure of responsibility 
and devotion to liberty, for the growth of man's 
spirit and not for unbridled ambition and material 
good, we can oppose to the excesses of license and 
personal ambition. 

But the heart-shaking part of this ancient message 
of the silence of the wilderness is that there are 
worse things even than the blotting out of our 
whole civilisation in war and anarchy. Terrible as 
that would be, it is better than to pamper the body 
and starve the spirit, to make machines of men and 
blot out human kindness, to find our heaven in 
the world and shut out God. Civilisation is a great 
good, and no prophet despises even its material 
blessings or ceases to hope for their return when 
men shall have discovered that prosperity is not a 
god to be worshipped, but only a means of worship- 
ping God through using it to serve the noblest 
welfare of His children. Yet civilisation is no end 
in itself, but, on the contrary, a civilisation, without 
justice and mercy, without purity and self-control, 
without reverence for truth and beauty and goodness, 
without a sense for things unseen and eternal, with- 
out a religion that passes by observances and activities 
and offerings to do justly and love mercy and walk 
humbly with our God, is the supreme obstacle to 
God's purpose with the spirit of man, and the su- 
preme denial of His eternal Rule of Truth and Love. 



28 A DYING CIVILISATION 



However appalling the agony, God will not hesitate 
to destroy it, nay, He has so made the world and 
the moral nature of things, that it is necessarily self- 
destructive, as, for the final good, every corrupt 
thing always is. Our present calamity may be great, 
yet to leave us in a state in which the world was 
our god and we had our selfish desires, but had 
leanness in our souls, would have been a still greater 
disaster, for it would have meant that God had re- 
nounced His high task with the world and the spirit 
of man. 

As of old salvation can only come through the 
holy remnant. To it we belong as we do not bow 
the knee to the Baal of worldly success and lust 
of pleasure and power, but worship the Father in 
spirit and in truth by reverencing only what is 
spiritual and true. 

Our first task is to save what we can of our 
present world by the call to sincere penitence and 
simple faith. But it may be that we shall not be 
heard till the striving and crying of a complex, 
worldly, prosperous age have fallen silent. Then our 
value for rebuilding our waste civilisation to the 
true glory of God and the real good of man will 
depend on the measure we have been, like Isaiah 
and the children that God had given him, for signs 
and for wonders, in our unfaltering faith that God 
does not fail and is not discouraged, and in our 
possession of the prophetic vision which sees 
through all the night of darkness and distress 'the 



A DYING CIVILISATION 



new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness/ Then so high will the destiny of 
man appear and so glorious God's final kingdom of 
peace established in truth and righteousness, that 
we shall know, how, throughout all the terrible 
journey towards it, 'in all our affliction He was 
afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved us: 
in His love and in His pity He redeemed us: and 
He bare us and carried us all the days of old/ 



Ill 



GOD'S INSTRUMENT AND GOD'S AGENT 

2 Kings viii. II. 'And he settled his countenance stedfastly upon 
him, until he was ashamed: and the man of God wept.' 

All of us alike are God's instruments. By no setting 
of our hearts on wickedness or doing evil with both 
our hands can we prevent God from using us. Our 
folly will serve Him, when our wisdom fails; our 
wrath praise Him, though our wills rebel. Yet, 
as God's instruments without intention and in our 
own despite, we generally serve God's ends only as 
we defeat our own. To be God's agent is quite 
another matter. This we are only as we learn God's 
will, respond to His call, work faithfully together 
with Him, and find our own highest ends in ful- 
filling His. 

But while the mere instrument is constantly 
broken and cast aside that God's work may proceed, 
the true good of His agent is itself of the essence 
of God's purpose. 

In Hazael and Elisha, as they stand looking into 
each other's eyes in that narrow ancient street, this 
contrast between God's blind, unwilling tool and 
His conscious, consecrated fellow-worker is incar- 
nate. We should consider them well, for both the 
use we shall make of life, and the use life will make 



GOD'S INSTRUMENT 31 



of us, depend entirely on whether we are of Hazael's 
kin or of Elisha's. 

1. Let us look at God's instrument 

You see the first minister of state, arrayed in 
oriental magnificence of office, with many gorgeous 
attendants in his train avouching his dignity, a 
channel of gifts beyond the dreams of avarice, the 
wielder of every power short of the sceptre, and of 
that also by the trust and favour of the king, with 
a renown which busy rumour has carried even to 
the prophet in hostile Israel. 

Hazael's abilities, moreover, are equal to his 
position and reputation. Especially he has imagina- 
tion, the pre-eminent gift for greatness, without 
which no man has royalty of nature for true distinc- 
tion in any sphere, but carries even riches and 
position and renown as a mere ass's burden. 
Imagination gives Hazael soaring ambition, and, 
what is more, munificence in things material and 
penetration into human qualities as wings to sustain 
its flight. The order to take a present in his hand 
expands into forty camels' load of all the good 
things of Damascus: and, the moment he sees 
Elisha, he is aware that this lavishness is not a 
whit overdone. He does not judge, like the children 
in Israel, by the cut of the hair or the fashion of 
the clothes, but discerns in that plain travel-stained 
civilian the biggest man he had ever met, a man to 
be addressed as, ' My Lord,' a man to whom nothing 



32 GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



less than a lordly present could be offered, and one 
well worth winning at the price. 

Nor is that all. The imagination of this Macbeth 
of Damascus is more stirred by the unseen than 
by the seen. A supernatural suggestion of his 
destiny means more to him than the possession of 
an army. It plays the part with him of the witches' 
prophecy with Macbeth, assuring to him: 

The golden round 
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem 
To have thee crown'd withal. 

Only the small and shallow man thinks he 
drives the chariot of the universe. What Goethe 
has called the demonic element in every really 
great man is, on the contrary, the sense of being a 
child of destiny. Though from men neither reverent 
nor scrupulous, Caesar's assurance in the storm, 
"You carry Caesar and his fortunes," and Napoleon's 
cry, "The world still turns for us," when the armies 
of Europe were hemming him in after the Russian 
disaster, have something akin to the religious 
assurance of a devout Calvinist like Cromwell. 
Nor can a man move the world with ideas any more 
than with deeds, without some sense, like the 
Apostle, of being consecrated to it from his mother's 
womb. 

Thus the world saw Hazael : and was it not right 
in thinking him a man to command the uses of 
the present and control the issues of the future? 

But Elisha showed himself truly a man of God 



AND GOD'S AGENT 



both by looking deeper into Hazael's heart and 
surprising there a guilty secret, which made himself 
weep and even this man of blood and iron look 
down ashamed before his steadfast gaze, and by 
looking farther into his fortunes and seeing the 
vanity of its gains when all should be weighed. 

Three marks of God's mere instrument Elisha 
discerned. 

Firsts there was unbridled ambition^ not less evident 
for a submissive bearing and a lowly speech. When 
Elisha tells of coming greatness, he knows he is 
only giving utterance to Hazael's own mind; and 
when Hazael replies, 'What is thy servant?,' the 
obeisance does not hide the thought that even the 
royal position and the most extended sway are no 
more than his desert. 

No driving force more ensures success than such 
vast ambition, even though it be the supreme denial 
of God's requirement of a humble mind in His 
children. And — what may seem still stranger in 
God's world — its success God often puts to great 
uses. Alexander's ambition of conquest spread the 
Greek language and Greek ideas for the progress 
of the world and the preparation for Christianity; 
Caesar's ambition imposed a peace upon the world, 
under which knowledge spread, and peaceful com- 
merce united the peoples, and a higher religion 
secured a footing in the earth; Napoleon's ambition 
ended many grave oppressions, emancipating a large 
part of Europe from serfdom, and ultimately for- 



GOB'S INSTRUMENT 



warded both freedom and equal law. And that 
remains true, though the misery for others and the 
fleeting profit for themselves justify Pascal's sarcastic 
estimate of the folly of swaggering about conquering 
the world, as excusable for a crude youth like 
Alexander, but unpardonable frivolity in a sensible 
middle-aged man like Caesar. The gain of the present 
ambition which is now blotting-out humanity is 
still beyond our vision, and the loss and suffering 
visible to the blindest, but we can still trust that 
God does not faint and is not discouraged, and that 
out of it He will bring something worthy of our 
distress, even while the ambitions themselves prove, 
as of old, self-destructive. 

In humbler spheres also, though, so far as its own 
true place and abiding possession is concerned, 

Vaulting ambition o'erleaps its selle 
And falls on th' other — , 

it is constantly an instrument of God for enriching 
life by discoveries and achievements which for no 
love of good its possessor ever had in his heart 
would he have pursued. While only by right motive 
does God estimate any man's good, the worst 
motive does not prevent God from using men for 
His own higher ends. . 

Second, you see atrocious cruelty. Hazael's ambition 
is not qualified by any illusion about the beneficence 
of his reign. Though the picture Elisha drew of the 
misery he was to work might have touched the hardest 
heart, when Hazael understood that he occupied the 



AND GOD'S AGENT 



35 



centre of the scene as a great conqueror, he cried, 
'But what is thy servant, who is but a dog, that he 
should do this great thing!' Cruelty for him was 
the equivalent of glory, and blood and tears the 
measure of renown. 

The story of human cruelty is an appalling record. 
How often has the conqueror repeated the work of 
Hazael, consuming towns with fire, slaying young 
men, dashing little ones in pieces, ripping up 
women with child. We dreamt that the heart of 
man had grown incapable of such iniquity: and now 
even that is beyond our dreaming. We may wonder 
if it be not capable still of inventing instruments of 
torture, and, like the Inquisition, attempting again to 
extend empire, by cruelty, from the body to the mind. 

Yet even cruelty God may turn to His own ends. 
Though still harder to accept than His use of 
ambition, without a trust that God has a purpose 
He can make it serve, human cruelty dethrones for 
us either God's goodness or His omnipotence; and 
one is a mockery without the other. 

This very trust, indeed, was the supreme victory 
of the prophetic faith. Elisha, even with eyes 
blinded by agony at the thought of what men must 
suffer in the world-catastrophe Hazael would set 
in motion, saw spiritual health behind this terrible 
material surgery. So awful was the calamity when it 
came that abject terror shrouded the heavens as well 
as the earth, till men sought to appease the insatiable 
cruelty of the gods by burning in sacrifice their own 

3—2 



36 GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



children in the fire. But amid this appalling reign 
of desolating fear, the prophets never departed from 
the confidence that even the brutal Assyrian, wading 
in blood and turning the fruitful earth into a waste, 
was only the axe in the hand of the Lord to 
destroy that He might build to better purpose, 
and to be itself destroyed in the process; or, still 
better, the senseless, perishable threshing-instrument 
to purge the grain, with no more than the due 
proportion of violence, for the sowing of a better 
harvest. 

As we think of the miseries which the insensate 
cruelty of ambitious men has brought upon the world, 
we cannot find the prophets' faith an easy victory. 
Nor can it be maintained in us except by a deep 
sense both of the wickedness and the worth of man's 
soul and of the difficulty and blessedness of the 
Kingdom which is to be entered by such tribulation. 
Only on that estimate can goodness be set above 
happiness, and righteousness above quietness, and 
the wisdom of God, which uses even cruelty to turn 
men to His way of love, be approved. 

Finally^ we see utter unscrupulousness. When the 
prophet told him that Benhadad, the king, would 
recover from his sickness, yet would not live, Hazael 
knew that his murderous secret was out, and, for 
the moment, almost seemed to blush. Yet, like 
Macbeth, he was not content to say, 

If chance will have me king, why, chance can crown me, 
Without my stir, 



AND GOD'S AGENT 37 



but resolved 'to catch the nearest way,' and be great, 
'no matter what illness should attend it.' Benhadad 
was with him also 'in double trust,' a sovereign 
who had given him every honour possible for a 
subject, and a sick man confiding in him as a friend, 

Who should against the murderer shut the door, 
Not bear the knife myself. 

But, as his master slept — perhaps the first restful 
sleep of returning health — Hazael dipped a cloth in 
water and spread it on his face, careless of the crime 
that stained his soul and careful only to leave no 
traces that might mar its success. Then Hazael too 
might have heard the cry, 

Sleep no more, 
[Hazael] does murder sleep, the innocent sleep, 
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, 
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, 
Chief nourisher in life's feast. 

Nothing is farther from the mind of God, nothing 
more utterly 'jumps the life to come,' nothing is 
more inconceivable as an. instrument of God. Yet, 
how hopeless should we be of any rule of God, 
had He no way of turning to use the unscrupulous 
crimes, the perpetrators of which have so often 
filled earth's highest seats. And when we think of it, 
what has better shown that 'God too is wise' than 
the way He diverts astute unscrupulousness to ends 
quite away from what it purposed. 

Only because of this power to use the wickedness 



38 GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



of man for issues the opposite of man's intent, can 
He at once intrust man with responsibility and rule 
the world. And because His rule of truth and love 
never could be achieved, were that responsibility 
recalled, the instrument is often for terrible rebuke 
and scourging for all man's sinful state and utter 
disaster and ruin for itself. The result is not an easy 
and prosperous and peaceful earth, but the question 
will not be, whether man has been happy in his 
course, but whether, finally, God has accomplished 
His spiritual purpose with him of making him, of 
his own insight and devotion, a son of God without 
rebuke in God's Kingdom of truth and righteousness. 

2. Let us look at God's agent 

Nothing shows the impression a man makes on 
the popular imagination like the wonderful stories 
which gather round his name. By that measure, 
no prophet, not even Elijah, compares with Elisha. 
And this is the more remarkable that the impression 
was not made by anything striking in his dress or 
appearance, as with Elijah. In this very absence 
of singularity he was a new type of prophet, some- 
what as Jesus differed from John the Baptist. The 
children mocked him, not because he was bald, but 
because his hair was cut. They were wont to see 
shaggy men of the wilds like Elijah, and here was 
an ordinary smooth, trimmed citizen : and no doubt 
the children reflected the opinion of their seniors 
that he was a feeble, innocuous imitation of the real 



AND GOD'S AGENT 



article. That was the first impression of the common 
people, but when they had time to look from the 
clothes to the man, they understood his significance 
even better than Hazael, and the mockery of him 
seemed an appalling piece of impious temerity, to 
which the tale about the bears, for the warning of 
impudent little boys in Israel, gives graphic expres- 
sion. 

But Elijah alone understood his full significance. 
When he called Elisha by casting his mantle over 
him, he was so overcome by horror at the con- 
sequences, that he sought to put ofT the evil day by 
undoing his own act, saying, 1 Go back; for what 
have I done to thee?' Elijah knew of Hazael and 
he knew of Jehu, and his thoughts of both were 
full of heavy foreboding, but neither of them in all 
their panoply of war shook his heart with dread like 
this prosperous yeoman, peacefully superintending 
his plowmen and himself ploughing among them 
in his working clothes. In him Elijah saw the fore- 
runner of a new type of prophet by whom God 
was to hew Israel, whose prophecy, for all its quiet 
reasonableness, was as dreadful as the lion's roar in 
the forest or the alarm of the trumpet in the besieged 
city. 

This description of his own work was used by 
Amos, Elisha's immediate successor, though all his 
days he remained to outward appearance a simple 
farmer and shepherd, who never looked or acted the 
professional prophet or belonged to any prophetic 



GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



guild. Hosea lived an ordinary married life among 
his people; Isaiah was a townsman and probably an 
aristocrat; Jeremiah was a priest, as unlike as pos- 
sible to a dervish or a revolutionary. From among 
the people they spoke to people and rulers, and mostly 
about the human relations they themselves shared 
with others. Their speech was not passionate or ex- 
cited, but calmly appealed to reason and conscience. 
They made large use of writing, the most intellectual 
invention of civilisation, and they frequently gave 
what they said studied poetic form. 

To the superficial, hasty mind which judges by 
appearance, they looked plain civilians, more trouble- 
some than important. But to the seeing eye, these 
agents of God, humbly consecrated to His purpose, 
with no appeal save to reason and righteousness, 
and no force except the nature of moral reality and 
the necessary disaster of selfishness and idolatry, 
were the most terrible of all judgments on a corrupt 
civilisation. 

God's agent is distinguished from God's mere 
instrument also by three characteristic marks. 

First, he has a quite different estimate from 
worldly ambition of what it is worth a mans whole 
effort to achieve. 

None dreamt of buying Elijah, but, from the 
lavish presents offered him, Elisha apparently gave 
the impression of a prosperous man who would 
naturally accept larger prosperity, could one make 
it worth his while. But no judgment by appearances 



AND GOD'S AGENT 41 



was ever more mistaken. His own not inconsider- 
able possessions he had given up at God's call, 
and the thought of replacing them by gifts from 
others never entered his mind. The imposing train 
of laden camels, which might to another man of his 
estate have proved as strong a temptation as the 
kingdom to Hazael, stirred in him no pulse of 
desire. For Elisha even the glory of an empire was 
a mere bauble when the morn was breaking blood- 
red on a doomed world. With that vision of judg- 
ment and of high, eternal issues rising out of 
judgment, whether he ate dry bread or fared 
sumptuously every day, or went in beggar's rags or 
royal purple mattered little: and to spend his 
strength for display or tinsel renown seemed a 
frivolous use of life and a missing of the values of 
eternity. 

That absorption in higher interests, which, with- 
out any ascetic sense of surrender, but by the sheer 
claims of life's calls, diverts from all mere love of 
possession and applause, marks all God's true agents. 

Second, God's agent carries out his commission 
with the Divine compassion in his heart, announcing 
no evil he does not share. Hazael exulting and 
Elisha weeping at the same prospect goes to. the 
heart of the difference between God's mere instru- 
ment and His true agent. Every genuine prophet 
has shared in Elisha's agony. No Old Testament 
prophet announces the day of calamity without a 
choking of tears that pleads for a repentance which 



42 GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



might avert it. Greatest of all is our Lord weeping 
over Jerusalem for the disaster even His ministry 
had failed to avert. 

Nor did any of them doubt that they were God's 
agents in this very thing, that the compassion in 
their hearts was in His heart also, and that He too 
would gather His children, as a hen gathers her 
chickens under her wing, to shield them from every 
storm, if only they would. 

Third, God's agent has a scrupulous regard for the 
direct way. 

Here might seem a place only for policy, a call 
above all to avoid dangerous suggestion. But the 
direct road to ruin was the one thing God had showed 
Elisha, and there was for him no other. Beyond it 
he saw the new world God would rebuild through 
his suffering servants, and if the way towards it 
lay through the blotting out of a corrupt civilisation, 
it was not for him to choose an easier, or, with how- 
ever heavy a heart, fail to carry out his appointed 
task in it. 

This stirring up of movements fraught with awful 
judgment for his age may seem a strange task for 
the passionate lover of his people, but every true 
agent of God has been engaged in it. The moment 
he sees that his people's real good is righteousness, 
not ease, and its worst danger undisturbed corrup- 
tion, he comes, like the Master, not bringing peace, 
but a sword, and, like the Apostles, turning the 
world upside down. 



AND GOD'S AGENT 43 



Man's stormy career throughout the ages has 
been due, above all else, to the ferment of spirit 
God's agents have stirred up within him, without 
which he would have grazed peacefully in the best 
pasture he could find, like other tame animals, or 
been at times, alone or in small groups, a not 
very effective beast of prey. Great movements even 
of destruction demand great loyalties which dis- 
regard ease and life itself, all of which prophetic 
souls have planted. Every true and great and just 
idea, moreover, is revolutionary amid dead faiths, 
formal worships, timid submission, material trusts, 
accepted wrongs. Not by human intent, but by 
the nature of things, it is disturbing, as the sun, 
by mere shining in the heavens, gathers the mist 
into torrent rain, rends the sky with lightning, and 
turns dead things into putrid corruption. And their 
justification is the same — the purifying of the air 
and the cleansing of the earth. 

The present unparalleled destruction has been 
traced back to a simple monk, the son of a charcoal- 
burner, standing before the mighty of the World 
and the Church, saying, 'Here I stand. I can do 
no other, so God help me.' At all events that caused 
the appalling miseries of the Thirty Years' War; 
and likely enough they are right who think its 
desolating effect not yet exhausted. But supposing 
Luther could have seen all these tremendous con- 
sequences of his action, are they right who think 
he ought to have done something other than God had 



GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



showed him, and that it would have been better to 
have left the peoples in quiet serfdom, undisturbed 
by ideas of liberty, and the Church in undivided 
superstition, undisturbed by the demand for truth 
and moral reality? 

When we search far enough back for the cause 
of our calamity, do we not arrive at Jesus Christ 
Himself? Nothing amazes us more than that this 
blotting-out of peoples should be the work of 
Christian nations. But are there any other nations 
for which it were possible? True it is because they 
are not really Christian, that the use they make of 
Christianity is often only the use festering corrup- 
tion makes of the sun. But our material idolatries 
might have given us self-interest enough to shun 
war, had it been crossed by no higher regards; and 
our corrupt civilisation might have held together 
longer, had there been in it no energy of higher 
aspiration. The rulers would not think of sacrificing 
their sheep as they do their fellows, and the reason is 
their fear of the Titanic spiritual forces in the souls 
of men. Nor, without the ideas and devotions, the 
aspirations and loyalties and consecrations which 
Christianity has inspired, would they have found 
the material for such a world-conflagration. 

War, moreover, is only a part, the smaller part, 
of the trouble caused in the world by God's agent. 
The unrest he has planted in man's soul maintains 
a perpetual striving and conflict and dissatisfaction 
which deny mankind under any conditions a placid 



AND GOD'S AGENT 45 



Elysium of well-fed ease. So far as it is not mere 
anxiety and greed, but aspiration and endeavour, 
this unrest is the measure of man's spiritual pro- 
gress, even though it be also a gift of sorrow and 
distress. 

For many, religion is purely conservation and 
comfort, the cement of the present social order, the 
bulwark of things accepted, the assurance of a pros- 
perous voyage through life and an abundant entrance 
into the life to come. But even formal religion may 
only be a sleeping volcano; and a living religion is 
always a portent in the earth, precisely because, with- 
out astute evasions, it must go the way that God 
has showed it. 

God's agent knows that God alone sees the end 
from the beginning, that unscrupulous policies to 
direct the issue of events to one's own liking and away 
from God's are as childish as they are impious, that 
there is no safe way in which short-sighted mortals 
cannot err except the plain path of duty, and that 
there is only one hazard worth taking, the hazard of 
doing what God demands. 

History is a long enough record to show the 
folly of crooked human policies and the wisdom 
of simple loyalty to truth and right. The story of 
Hazael and Elisha does not stand alone, but it is 
a great example. Before Hazael's unscrupulous 
astuteness lay a little day of brief authority, and 
then destruction for the dynasty he had sinned to 
establish and desolation for the country whose great- 



4 6 



GOD'S INSTRUMENT 



ness was to maintain his renown. The irony of it all 
appears in this, that only from the writings inspired 
by the work of Elisha do later generations know 
anything of his little honourable career. Before Elisha 
lay the great and still inspiring teaching of the pro- 
phets, the purification of the Exile, and the heaven- 
scaling spiritual hopes of the Return, and above all 
Jesus and the Christian Church. And the end is not 
yet, nor will be till all the work of time is measured 
by eternity. 

The greatest of us who seeks, by his own devices 
and in disregard for others, to achieve his own per- 
sonal ambitions, will only make a little noise for a 
little time in our little world, then pass into oblivion 
with all his work turned to other ends than his own. 
But the least of us who lives only for God's purposes, 
guided alone by what God has showed, will, in our 
own degree, add to God's eternal treasure of good, 
and not ourselves pass away from our share in the 
inheritance, but be heirs of God and joint-heirs with 
Jesus Christ. 

All wickedness makes God's way with men 
necessarily harder, and the realisation of His King- 
dom necessarily through greater agony both for 
Himself and His children. Yet, even by it, God is 
not mocked in His government of the world, nor 
hindered in achieving its end. But for man, drawing 
his little breath on earth between the eternities, the 
one serious task, a task that has all the powers of 
the universe on its side, is to know the will of God 



AND GOD'S AGENT 47 



in humility and to do it in simple obedience and 
full purpose of heart. Then only can we know that, 
measured both by time and eternity, our labour is 
not in vain in the Lord. 

Let no mortal leave 
The onward path, although the earth should gape 
And from the gulf of hell 'Destruction' cry, 
To take dissimulation's winding way. 



IV 



REBUILDING 

Isaiah ix. 9-10. 'And all the people shall know, even Ephraim and the 
inhabitant of Samaria, that say in pride and in stoutness of heart, 
The bricks are fallen, but we will build with hewn stone: the 
sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars.' 

The exact time when these words were first spoken 
and the precise situation to which they originally 
applied are uncertain, but the place they now occupy 
in the book of Isaiah shows that the temper of which 
they speak was thought to be characteristic of Israel 
up to the first Assyrian invasion. 

Throughout the long reign of Jeroboam II the 
Northern Kingdom had enjoyed unexampled pros- 
perity. She seemed peculiarly secure, not only in 
her own strength, but in an alliance with Syria, her 
nearest and most powerful neighbour and hitherto 
her chief adversary. 

The preceding passage about Zebulun and the 
land of Naphtali tells of a new and greater danger. 
Beyond Syria to the north-east lay Assyria. A com- 
mon soldier called Pul had there risen to the top 
in days of revolution. With the usual conqueror's 
appropriation of the Deity, he expanded his name 
to Tiglath-pil-eser, which means the god Tiglath 
helps Pul. He proved something of a Napoleon, 
and, under his leadership, Assyria took one of those 



REBUILDING 



49 



military fevers which seem to make men and even 
women dream of nothing save war and conquest. 
On any pretext or none she fell on her neighbours, 
and, as Isaiah expresses it, gathered the nations as 
one gathers eggs. For the securing of the empire 
thus won military measures were resorted to, of 
which the Turk, at his worst, is the only modern 
parallel. Transportation of whole peoples, extensive 
planting among them of aliens, tribute, wholesale 
robbery, rape, murder and slavery so terrorised the 
suffering peoples that even their religion became a 
ghastly fear of gods who could only be appeased by 
human sacrifice. And then the Assyrian, after thus 
turning the garden into a wilderness, boasted of it as 
the extension of civilisation. 

In face of such an experience, was it not true 
pride and real stoutness of heart in Israel to be able 
to say, 'The bricks have fallen, but we will build 
with hewn stone*? Is there not here an uncon- 
querable buoyancy and native courage we must 
admire; and have we not a right to expect victory 
over any calamity for so tough and virile a people? 

Moreover, there was an element of faith in it 
as well as of pertinacity. The mass of the religious 
teachers said, We are God's chosen people; ours is 
a purer religion and a higher civilisation; we were 
at peace, and our alliances were for defence and not 
for aggression; we were rich, but by peaceful com- 
merce. As God is on our side, we cannot forever be 
overborne by an unholy spirit of domination. And, 



o.s. 



4 



5° 



REBUILDING 



though they were more concerned to say what was 
acceptable than what was true, they were not wholly 
mistaken. 

Yet there were a few men, scarcely more than 
one or two in a generation, men as unpopular as 
they were few, who spoke to a quite different purpose. 
While others were still living in undisturbed 
security, they had already announced the calamity; 
and now they continued to say, You will never 
rebuild the old edifice with any material. 

This attitude was the more amazing that they 
alone of all men were undismayed by the might of 
the foe. For them Assyria was a mere senseless 
axe in the hand of a Higher Power, doomed herself 
also presently to destruction. She might fill the 
world with clamour and boast herself against any 
God who was not her own private possession, but 
the issue of impious brutality, these prophets knew, 
was self-destruction. To-day she speaks only in 
arrogant inscriptions, made permanent by being 
engraved on stone, and in writings, mostly about 
material possessions, still extant because burned into 
brick; but there is no vital word in them for any 
living soul, and they are commentated by the barren 
mounds, once great cities, from which they are dug. 
This the prophets foresaw, not, as it has been 
the fashion lately to maintain, by political foresight, 
but by religious insight into the principles upon 
which God determines the destinies of men and 
nations. 



REBUILDING 



5 1 



Alone they stood in that age, free from fear of 
man, emancipated by faith in a God who never 
comes short in power or wisdom or purpose of 
good, a God whose judgment even is in mercy. 
Yet they never wavered in their quite hopeless out- 
look on the material situation; and they continued 
to say to their contemporaries, Not only is your 
self-confidence vain, but also your religious trust is 
the pride which goes before a deeper fall and the 
stoutness of heart which persists to the final disaster. 
Such a message naturally seemed to those who heard 
it both unpatriotic and irreligious, but, unfortunately 
for Israel, it proved to be true. 

The basis of this judgment was quite simple. 
The bricks, the prophets said, fell from the^weakness 
of the building, and not from the violence of the 
assault. With different spiritual conditions conquest 
might never have happened; and, in any case, 
nations do not crumble before mere conquest. The 
cause which made the disaster so utter was the 
turning of the nation's moral cement into sand. 
And it was irretrievable, because no amendment of 
men's individual ways was providing better mortar. 

The meaning of the prophets is plain enough in 
what they say of men, but the peculiar quality of 
their judgment comes out even more definitely in 
what they say of women. Nothing marks so clearly 
their estimate of what is important and unimportant, 
strong and weak, than the peculiar value assigned 
to woman's influence. 



4—2 



52 REBUILDING 

John Knox, when asked how he could be so bold 
with Queen Mary, replied, "I have looked in the 
face of many angry men and not been overly afeard : 
why should I fear the pleasing face of a gentle- 
woman ? " But the prophets argued otherwise. Their 
whole judgment of life depended on looking in the 
face of the Assyrian trooper and not being at all 
afraid, and being filled with foreboding when they 
looked in the face of the Israelite gentlewoman. 

A recent writer has proclaimed the attainment 
by the fairer half of humanity of power as the advent 
of something like the millennium. But, even in 
that remote age and in that oriental society, the 
prophets seem to have thought that woman had 
already arrived very mightily at power. The quantity 
of her influence they seem to have thought practically 
unlimited, but being apparently of Mrs Poyser's 
opinion that 'God made the women to match the 
men,' they were less sure of the quality, taking the 
question of the use of power to be of character and 
not of sex. 

We shall not understand in the least what they 
say unless we realise first the reverence that was in 
them for true womanhood. The sternest of all is 
Amos who speaks of the gentlewomen of Samaria 
as 'kine of Bashan' who crush the needy and say 
unto their lords, 'Bring and let us drink/ Yet he 
speaks sorrowfully of Israel as a virgin; and the 
saddest thing he knows is the fair virgin going into 
captivity. Hosea still more definitely regards the 



REBUILDING 



53 



corruption of the women as the root of the national 
disintegration, but he repudiates the idea of one 
morality for the man and another for the woman, 
and his own unquenchable love for his erring wife 
was the well-spring of his unfaltering faith in a 
God who would never lose His tenderness for His 
erring people. Isaiah calls his wife the prophetess, 
as if she freely and equally shared both the burden 
and the hope of his high calling, while Ezekiel's 
wife is described as the light of his eyes. No crime 
is greater to Micah than casting out the women of 
his people from their pleasant homes; and he cannot 
think of any figure for frustrated endeavour like the 
anguish of travail without the joy of motherhood. 

If we bear that sympathy and reverence in mind, 
we shall understand what Isaiah meant by his 
elaborate assault upon the finery which was carried 
with mincing steps and wanton eyes along the streets 
of his native city. What hurt him was the idea 
that woman was a mere peg to hang clothes on for 
man's gratification, and that one to whom God had 
given tenderness and helpfulness should be so blind 
and callous as to take advantage of the riches which 
war brings to the few, amid the abject misery which 
it works for the many. Every detail of the offensive 
display burnt itself into his soul, because it seemed 
to him the final mark of the thoughtless selfishness 
which is the dissolution of society, the final denial 
of any hope of permanent recovery, the thing which 
said most loudly that, for all his people's suffering, 



54 



REBUILDING 



God's anger was not turned away, but His hand 
was stretched out still. 

Finally, as the end drew near, Jeremiah saw its 
most ominous threat in a king who would place his 
womenfolk in a palace ceiled with cedar and painted 
with vermilion, at the cost of the oppression, the 
poverty, the miseries of the common people. 

But the callous luxury of the women did not 
concern the women alone. It was the mark of 
false values in men and women alike, showing that 
the men also had lost faith in the divine things of 
purity and tenderness and the beauty of holiness and 
inward peace. In both alike it proved the loss of the 
justice and trust between man and man which alone 
can preserve any social structure from becoming 
a heap of ruins. 

Compared with this decay of the spiritual mortar, 
the assault of the Assyrian was a trivial incident. 
Israel might still be a highly religious nation in all 
that concerned creed and ceremonial, but God was 
not in all her people's ways; and, for the prophets, 
God and His requirements and purposes were the 
only realities in the world which might not, without 
disaster, be disregarded. And, so far as Israel at 
least was concerned, they were not mistaken. 

This is very ancient history, but it is the nature 
of history to be constantly repeating itself. And a 
story of long ago has the advantage over our present 
experience that it has been told to the end and its 
prophetic principles have been tested by the final 



REBUILDING 



55 



issue. Wherefore, it may still shed some light for us 
upon what is truly strong and what is weak, upon 
what will sustain our society and what will expose 
it to dissolution, upon what we purpose in faith and 
what we purpose in mere pride and stoutness of 
heart. 

In the middle of the War a minister of state 
prophesied to us, saying: "This country, therefore, 
so far from being impoverished, will be richer in 
everything that constitutes real and true wealth. 
We shall be a better organised, better equipped, 
better trained, and, what is more important perhaps, 
a better disciplined nation." The context made plain 
that a greater edifice of material wealth was meant 
and that it was to be built by more elaborate 
organisation, and that the cement of it, which is 
called discipline, was really drill. Apparently we 
are to have more capital than ever, and the masses are 
to be still more pliant to its control, and mechanical 
production is to be more than ever man's chief 
occupation. We shall sit in a more unassailable 
security, our hands gathering the treasure of the 
whole earth; and, if the smoke of our chimneys, 
as we work it up for a world which war has sent 
back to the shovel and the plough, is a denser 
curtain than ever between us and the sun, we shall 
have compensation when, in the reign of a new 
Solomon, the silver is as stones. And if wealth, as 
of old, increases the slum, how will it glorify the 
palace! 'The bricks are fallen but we will build 



56 



REBUILDING 



with hewn stone; the sycomores are cut down, but 
we will change them into cedars.' And the Peace 
seems to have been made to prophesy in the same 
vein even more than the War. 

The vast sacrifice of life for those who are gone 
and of happiness for those they have left behind 
, are to secure for any who are alive and have heart 
to begin again the old order in greater splendour, 
with the old scurry and rivalry, the old driving 
of the weak to the wall, the old round of trivial 
distractions, the old care for what we shall eat and 
what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be 
clothed, the old marrying and giving in marriage 
for every reason except love and mutual esteem, the 
old measuring of worth by possession, the old 
materialism and externality which has made us 
barren for so long in every field of original produc- 
tion, and which has made religion a mere buttress of 
respectability. And many are content to have it so. 

But possibly God meaneth not so: and, though 
we have not thought much about His methods and 
purposes, they may, after all, be of consequence in 
the final issue. Perhaps the bricks have fallen more 
than we yet realise. Capital which has become 
debt is merely exaction without equivalent. At no 
time was its distribution determined by the value 
of service rendered, but, taken as a whole, capital 
formerly had behind it somewhere the benefits of 
past labours. But when it has been blown into the 
air and exists nowhere, how long will its nominal 



REBUILDING 



57 



recognition continue to be of value? In any case, 
sooner or later, the old system is going to fall. Will the 
bricks of individual competition be replaceable by the 
hewn stone of organisation, whether of socialism or, 
as it rather appears at present, of monopolistic trusts ? 

But what if the issue does not really concern 
either, and if, as of old, the real problem of security 
is neither brick nor stone, but mortar? And what 
if that must be ethical and spiritual? What if drill 
as a substitute is mere dividing sand? What if our 
real strength and greatness depend more on how we 
spend than on what we get, on our homes than on 
our workshops, on the thoughts of our women than 
on the swords of our warriors? 

The old order may not pass without causing 
much suffering we rightly fear and the loss of many 
blessings we rightly cherish. A poorer, narrower, 
obscurer age may ensue. But if we can exchange 
pride and self-indulgence and lust of dominion and 
callous rivalry and vain activities and measureless 
discontent for peace of heart and brotherly relations 
and the simple and beautiful arts of living, we shall be 
well repaid both for our suffering and for our loss. 

Primarily it is a question of what are life's best 
possessions. That is determined for us by the things 
unseen and eternal, which are according to man's 
soul and not his circumstances or visible belongings. 
Being thus simply human, they are not different for 
any of us, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, man 
or woman. For the most part, though so lofty in 



5* 



REBUILDING 



principle, they come down in practice to the plain 
issue of being ready in daily life to deny ourselves 
all good not justly and mercifully won, to seek, in 
contentment with such things as we have, the beauty 
of inward peace, to set above luxuries the purity of 
our homes and the sacredness of our affections: in 
short to value life itself above all its trappings. 

In Christ, in this sense, there is neither male nor 
female. We must all alike be concerned to discover 
that love alone is mighty to bind men together in 
a more excellent fellowship, and that the things of 
love concern our moral valuation of persons and not 
our material valuation of things. And we shall need 
to devote ourselves to its service with high courage 
and devotion, if we are not to return to a primitive 
barbarism in which men fight and women toil. 

But, while we are alike in the duty of consecrating 
all our gifts, we are not alike in the measure of the 
gifts we have to consecrate. Perhaps, therefore, I 
may be pardoned if I ask you women, and more 
particularly you younger women, with your greater 
endowment for the personal aspect of life, to weigh 
your enormous influence for good and evil. 

When real, woman is more sincere than man; 
when sympathetic, more wisely helpful; when 
devoted, more courageous; when spiritual, more 
direct in arriving at the central issues. But we all 
have the defects of our qualities, when we fail to 
realise them. Wherefore, when woman is blind, she 
can more effectively shut her eyes, when ambitious 



REBUILDING 



59 



be more unscrupulous, when material make greater 
sacrifices of truer blessings for display. In your 
hands largely is the question of a simpler, quieter, 
more human and contented life. What is needed 
above all else is the recovery of your great gift for 
discerning character, and for teaching that nothing in 
all the world makes up for true comradeship in the 
battle of life. Is there any cause of the chaos in our 
social life so certain or so powerful as the dazzling 
of this insight by the glitter of wealth and foolish 
social fallacies? 

In the end the matter is for all of us a question, 
not of resolve, but of faith. Unless we believe in 
God as the final might and the things of God, 
which are justice and sympathy and the spirit of peace 
and the service of love, as the final good, we shall 
none of us ever build to wiser, kinder, more spiritual, 
and, therefore, lasting purpose, than in former days ; 
and the higher the edifice, either of brick or hewn 
stone, the intenser our effort and the vaster our 
organisation, the more certain it is to fall in ever 
more hopeless ruin. 



V 



GOD'S IDEAL AND MAN'S REALITY 

Isaiah ii. 5. '0 house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light 
of the Lord.' 

M uch of the prophetic literature was collected, 
not by the prophets themselves, but by their dis- 
ciples, and that amid a ruin and chaos which admitted 
of little opportunity for studying chronology or 
order. Our text might, therefore, be a mere isolated 
ejaculation remembered only because of its impressive 
form, to which we could attach no precise meaning, 
because we no longer know in what connection 
it was originally spoken. But if the connection 
in which it now stands affords a clear meaning, 
there can be no good reason for doubting that we 
have the original setting in which its author himself 
put it. 

Our text is preceded by the great poem which is 
still the most memorable of all songs of peace; and 
it is followed by a prose description of a country 
where everything is the absolute opposite of this 
hope. Are we to suppose that this intense contrast 
both in form and matter is a mere happy accident 
of juxtaposition, without any intention on the part 
either of the author or his editor? And this is the 
less probable that, when we read the passage as 



IDEAL AND REALITY 61 



one whole, with our text as the connecting link, it 
takes on a clear and vivid meaning, and the impres- 
sion both of the poem of ideal peace and the prose 
of actual calamity is intensified. 

The light of the Lord in which men are called 
to walk is, in that case, nothing other than the 
ideal of perfect peace in perfect righteousness of 
which the prophet has just sung, and the House of 
Jacob he summons to walk in it is just the idolatrous 
material people whose debasement and calamity he 
goes on to describe. Then the whole passage is the 
great appeal of religion to walk by faith in God's 
eternal purpose and not by sight of man's present 
securities, to walk amid the world's idolatries as those 
who know that the Lord God omnipotent alone 
reigns. 

The saying may still appear an abrupt ejaculation, 
but it is the abruptness of a shining stream between 
a mountain and a morass, which at once marks their 
connection and heightens their contrast. 

It summons us dwellers on the low morasses 
where the malaria breeds to lift up our eyes to the 
mountain of God's unchanging purpose, which soars 
serene above all the hills of human endeavour, from 
whence alone comes the pure air to fill our lungs with 
health and give us strength to keep pressing forward 
towards those heavenly steeps. 

If you climb the western slope of the Jura and 
suddenly come out at the top upon the panorama 
of the Alps, your first impression is of the whole 



62 GOD'S IDEAL AND 



earth tilted up into the sky, until you discover that 
what seemed a rampart of cloud is the real range 
of the snow mountains. Then all the vast masses 
of the Oberland seem to sink to a lower plane, and 
rather to lie below you than to tower above. 

The ideal of the Lord shines high and distant on 
our horizon like that solemn silver range, and the 
question which decides all the levels of human endea- 
vour is whether it is solid mountain or mere cloud 
phantasy. 

Through countless centuries this hope has stood 
there in its dim impressiveness, seemingly little nearer 
for all man's longing and endeavour. Some two thou- 
sand six hundred years have passed since Isaiah made 
this appeal; and, as the poem is found only slightly 
different in his contemporary Micah and is not like 
the style of either, probably it is a quotation and still 
older. That it was old and familiar may even be the 
point of Isaiah's appeal. Here, he would say, is the 
long dreamed of, long accepted ideal of the Lord 
which you all know : and here still, in sad contrast, 
is the actual House of Jacob, in no dimmest fashion 
changed into the likeness of it. 

Eight centuries after Isaiah, the prophecy of the 
New Testament ends as the prophecy of the Old 
began. The author of the Book of Revelation pre- 
dicts a new Jerusalem which is still essentially the 
old ideal of perfect peace in perfect righteousness. 
But he is still waiting for it to come down from 
God out of heaven, while the actual world he lived 



MAN'S REALITY 



63 



in was as full as ever of idolatry, which had still in 
its train the devastating harvest of lies and murders 
and impending disasters. 

Since then nearly two millenniums have passed, 
and is this new Jerusalem much nearer being built, 
either in 'England's green and pleasant land,' or 
in any other country beneath the sun ? The weight 
of armaments even in peace oppressed the nations. 
Suspicion and dread shadowed the intercourse of 
the peoples, and all the acquired dexterities of 
centuries were devoted to the arts of war. And now, 
never from Isaiah's own day, when the Assyrian 
was gathering the nations like eggs, and glorying 
in making men slaves and turning large portions of 
the earth into a desert, has there been a direr con- 
trast to his ideal of peace. Scarce a nation remains 
which has not lifted up its sword against another; 
the ploughshare itself has become only another kind 
of sword; the first law which goes forth from any 
Zion is the might of the strongest; and the final 
word of destiny is taken to be poison gas and 
torpedoes. But why are we astray on this perilous 
path? Is it the failure of God's light or man's 
failure to walk in it? 

We had, indeed, long been told that it was time 
men gave up all notions of Divine ideals, all dreams 
of walking in any light but man's, and contented 
themselves with working for such immediate earthly 
good as they might reasonably hope to see attained. 
Instead of dreaming of a perfect reign of God, we 



64 GOD'S IDEAL AND 



were to set ourselves to work for as perfect a reign 
of man as may be, having learned that all beyond 
sprang from the uncritical phantasy of the childhood 
of the race. Having suffered the disenchantment of 
knowledge, we were, as practical people, to dismiss 
the whole business of religion as a distraction from 
life's effective task of realising time's nearer hopes. 
Instead of childishly wasting our time building 
castles in the air, we were to provide adequate 
cottages upon earth, and accomplish this and other 
material reforms, not by appeals to righteousness, 
but by getting to work at once with the organisation 
of science and the strong hand of legislation. 
Personal appeals to the heart and conscience, we 
were assured, had only been shackles on progress 
and the true reason why it ' halted on palsied feet.' 
We were, therefore, to drill and march men in 
companies into a golden age to be created by 
compulsory education and a universally organised 
abundance. 

For many long years of prosperity these material 
and immediate schemes for improving the world 
seemed full of promise; and their acceptance was 
thought to mark the advent of the true millennium, 
from which we might new date the progress of the 
world. 

Yet this very trust in gain and not in godliness, 
in means and not in men was the very state of 
things from which the prophets augured an era of 
disaster; and a man is a prophet as he is not dazzled 



AND MAN'S REALITY 65 



by present prosperity, but reads from the hearts of 
men the issues of life. 

With all its promise, the business languished: and 
the very thing it lacked was just the vitalising breath 
of reverence for God's image in His children. 

Education did a great work, yet somehow it did 
not educate, its most immediate result being to expose 
millions of undisciplined minds in all classes to a flood 
of distracting nonsense and misleading suggestion. 

Again our mastery over nature and our organisa- 
tion of industry were stupendous achievements, but 
they failed to serve our real human needs. Its 
most obvious result was to turn men into machines, 
pack them in dense city areas, and expose them to 
continual uncertainty of employment. 

Our national enterprise achieved the vastest empire. 
But the good it accomplished had its reverse side 
of selfish policies, which, in exploiting the weak, ex- 
posed the austerity of our toil and the equality of our 
justice to dangers no conquering people has wholly 
escaped. 

Riches won by selfish dexterity and concentration 
on material interests were spent with a wastefulness 
and pride of display which made all the bitterer the 
vast poverty which they increased and did not remove. 
Our state was coming to be a worse denial of the 
eternal righteousness and the things of the soul than 
even the brutalities and horrors of war, just because 
it was so calmly accepted as the necessary and even 
blessed order of the world. 



o. s. 



5 



66 



GOD'S IDEAL 



It was the old story of the House of Jacob, of a 
land full of silver and gold, and of abject, grinding 
poverty; a land full of chariots and horses, and of 
ruthless competition and the unchecked might of 
the strong. And the heart of the evil was the same — 
a land full of idols, a land of mean material reverences 
and the covetousness which is the blind selfish 
essence of idolatry. This worldliness is the miasma 
of life's low levels, and the nation which breathes it 
only cannot, by any organisation, effort or material 
success, ever be in health and vigour. 

Even the Church, our special spiritual House of 
Jacob, whose very business it is to live by the ideal 
of God's righteous rule and finished purpose, lan- 
guished in this atmosphere, being also replenished 
from the East, having her own devices of display, her 
own forms of worldliness, her own material trusts, 
her own worship of visible power, her own undivine 
venerations, and, in consequence, her own bitterness 
and suspicions and strifes about things unworthy and 
unessential. 

To shut our eyes to our real state is calamitous 
illusion; and nothing stands so much between us 
and a triumphant vision of faith. No true word of 
God ever blinks a fact, and no one is a prophet 
except as he sees deeper into evil and feels more 
bitterly oppression and wrong than other men. The 
most notable figures in human history are the heroic, 
lonely prophetic souls who, in days of prosperity, 
have looked through all shams and unrealities and 



AND MAN'S REALITY 67 



gone straight to the thoughts and faiths of men. 
They alone proved themselves able to meet the 
days of supreme conflict which they had foreseen, 
with unfaltering courage, because they had also the 
vision of the rule and purpose of God. 

Can they, with their penetrating and far-seeing 
eyes, have been wrong in thinking this rule and 
purpose the only abiding reality, while we, with our 
purblind and earthly vision, are right in regarding 
all higher hopes as mere cloud phantasm? 

What surer proof can we have that their vision 
of hope was no illusion than the certainty that their 
interpretation of life was no mistake? While our 
senses are dulled by repetition, till we unthinkingly 
accept iniquity, because, amazing reason ! it is com- 
mon, they were delivered from the blindness of custom, 
and found the persistence of wrong no palliation, but, 
as it is in reality, its worst horror, and saw every 
crime as freshly as when the startled earth first drank 
the blood of Abel, as new for him who commits it 
and for him who suffers from it. 

Because of this same fresh and inspired insight, 
they not only foresaw war, but they understood all 
its calamity, never losing the individual in the mass 
or thinking in terms of armies and political changes. 
They felt war, as it truly is, as the individual agonies 
of human terror when all men prided themselves on 
was laid low and the idols they trusted in proved 
vain and they sheltered in holes and caves like the 
wild creatures. Yet it was precisely in this storm, 

5—2 



68 



GOD'S IDEAL 



when it came, that the prophetic hope of a Day of 
the Lord, which was to transform all this desolation 
into perfect peace in perfect holiness, blazed up to 
its full splendour. 

This great hymn of God's rule and the end of war 
came out of no time of piping peace. If we listen 
aright, we hear in it the sob of a people robbed 
and spoiled. The need of the country was plough- 
shares, for 

All her husbandry doth lie on heaps 
Corrupting in its own fertility; 

and pruning hooks, for all her hedges are 

Like prisoners wildly o'ergrown with hair; 

and law, for 'the tabernacles of robbers prosper/ 
and 'the poor of the earth hide themselves like wild 
asses in the desert'; and a Word of the Lord, for 
the whole higher nature decays when men 

nothing do but meditate on blood. 

Yet the essence of the prophetic view is that it 
is vain to begin with war, vain to think we can guard 
against it by any reorganisation of force; and they 
would have had just as little hope in a League of 
Nations by itself as in any other device of human 
policy. You cannot have peace till you first have 
justice, and justice first between individuals, and 
not first between nations. While you have the 
'glooming alleys' on the one hand, and, on the 
other, a 'wide house built by unrighteousness and 
its spacious chambers ceiled with cedar and painted 



AND MAN'S REALITY 69 



vermilion by injustice/ you have a state of things 
more calamitous for all that God seeks in His 
children than even the desolation of war. And you 
cannot have justice till you have first rid your souls 
of idolatry, for the covetous soul is essentially and 
radically unjust. Therefore, the last question about 
society is, What do men reverence, what do they 
adore and trust ? So long as they worship position not 
balanced by responsibility, military power indifferent 
to justice, wealth careless of humanity, they cannot 
have peace. What one man has only as another 
wants necessarily breeds strife; and what rests on 
force logically justifies the strong in taking what 
they think they require. Not till we worship God 
by reverence for man made in His image, and believe 
that the final might in the world is truth and character 
and service and the spirit of love, can war be a 
struggle for peace or anything more than a blotting 
out of humanity for material policies. Nor can we 
ever hope to bring the forces into operation which 
will make an end of war while we worship the things 
for which wars are made. War may be the fever, 
but idolatry is the malaria, and the fever is re- 
cuperative only as we get rid of the malaria. And 
this we can do only as we draw our breath from the 
mountain of the Lord and not from the miasma of our 
own low material reverences. 

Hence the great ideal hopes of the prophets 
came out of ages when the actual state of society 
led other men to despair. The reason was not merely 



70 GOD'S IDEAL 

that men long most ardently for what they least 
possess, but that, when the idols which block up the 
temples of our hearts are broken, we may see the 
high altar of the patient goodness of God; when the 
chambers of our imagery, in which we sit in the 
narrow circle of our dim human candles, are unroofed, 
we may come out into the light of the Lord. That 
light shines of itself and we have no need to paint it 
'costly gay,' but we cannot walk in it so long as we 
are walled in by the illusions of our idolatries, and 
accept the unrighteousness by which we profit as the 
eternal order of the world, and seek to live in a private 
heaven for ourselves of isolated opulence. 

Most confidently, therefore, in times when man's 
trust in man 'whose breath is in his nostrils and is 
nothing to be accounted of was broken, the prophet 
looked for a Day of the Lord when God's patient 
working would have won the hearts of His children 
and perfect peace would be established in perfect 
righteousness: and then most earnestly he called 
upon men to walk in the light of it. He was like 
the physician who, just because he has traced disease 
to one prolific form of life, in the day of pestilence 
sees it carried on every breath of polluted air, yet 
finds security in windows open towards heaven, 
and never ceases to dream that, just because he has 
traced the infection to one root, it may be utterly 
extirpated. Thus the prophet's more terrible diagnosis 
of our disease, which finds it no rash of the skin to 
be healed with salves, but a malady of the heart 



AND MAN'S REALITY 71 



which 'is deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked/ is also the ground of his hope, for he is no 
longer concerned with reforms which heal one sore 
only to see another break out, but with a single radical 
conversion from worship of the things seen and tem- 
poral to trusting the things unseen and eternal. 

Our fellowship is religious as we feel the personal 
sorrow and desolation of war, yet penetrate beneath 
it to injustice, and beneath injustice to idolatry, and 
from that discovery to the hope of a new reverence 
for the things of God which are in the hearts of His 
children. 

The nation which can make this discovery and 
say, 'Come and let us walk in the light of the Lord/ 
will be established in righteousness; against the 
Church which makes this call its supreme business 
the gates of hell will not prevail. But, above all, 
each one who knows for himself has the victory which 
overcomes the world, even if our House of Jacob 
— be it country or church — continue in idolatry. The 
Church of those met in the name of Him over whom 
the world's idolatries had no power, will not, we 
may hope, wholly fail us, but if it did and we should 
have to stand alone, as His Cross means victory over 
the idolatries of fears, possessions, favours, we can bear 
our solitary witness, heroic, even tragic, if required 
of us, in public action or public appeal, if that be our 
duty, or privately, humbly, by what we are, rather than 
by what we do or say, if that be the way of God's 
appointing. 



72 IDEAL AND REALITY 



We may still have to live long on the low un- 
drained fens, and to realise that, in the fulfilment 
of His purpose, a thousand years are with God as 
one day, but we shall never question that the 
mountain of the House of the Lord is established 
above all the hills of human powers and policies, 
because it will not only be the shining goal of our 
aspirations, but its divine air will enable us, as we 
wait on the Lord in times of great depression, 'to 
mount up with wings as eagles,' in times of great 
strain, 'to run and not be weary/ and above all, 
in the long common day when nothing happens 
save the monotony of toil and endurance, 'to walk 
and not faint/ Precisely in the darkness and the 
storm when earthly lights are blotted out, we have 
most need to look to heaven and discover that only 
what is above earth's turmoil can be our guiding 
light in the midst of its darkness and its distress. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



John xii. 46. 'I am come a light into the world, that whosoever 
believeth on me should not abide in darkness.' 

The idea of Jesus as the light of the world has 
been made so familiar to you from infancy by word 
and picture that probably it has never occurred to 
you to ask whether you really believe it. Still less 
perhaps have you ever conceived that you might 
mistake the meaning of a figure so simple. Yet 
many have vehemently and passionately denied that 
it is true ; and sometimes at least through a mis- 
understanding which is not confined to unbelievers. 

To many ' the pale Galilean ' seems to have passed 
like the shadow of a black cloud over a formerly 
sun-lit world. They say He changed the old full- 
blooded pagan joy in living into a timid, anaemic 
anxiety about one's soul, and replaced the courageous 
and self-respecting morality of free men by a slavish 
subjection and cringing humility. Especially they 
think that He turned the cult of beauty and grace 
and the fullness of a glad existence into the morbid 
cult of suffering and death. Moreover, this seems 
to them as erroneous as it is gloomy. Did not He 
teach meek submissiveness : and does not science 
teach success to the successful fighter for his own 



74 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



hand ? Is not even His teaching about love a mistaken 
sentimentality about the laggards, which retards the 
race in its progress? Above all His Cross, we are 
told, so far from being light in the world, is the 
blackest shadow which has ever fallen upon its bright- 
ness. It is no object of contemplation for strong, virile, 
energetic men, but only for the ascetic, the effeminate, 
the feeble, the terror-stricken. Thus to no Jew of 
ancient times was the Cross more of an offence than 
it was, for example, to Heine : and to many seekers 
after wisdom, now as formerly, it is foolishness. 

We must not shirk this issue, for, till it is decided, 
there is no believing in Jesus, with such belief, at 
least, as He intended. If they are right, He was 
wrong : and, till we see that He was right, real belief 
in Him there cannot be. To come a light into the 
world is to show the world as it truly is and its uses 
as they genuinely profit. If He was only a mistaken 
enthusiast, the sooner we radically and emphatically 
disbelieve in Him the better, because the quality of 
light is to enlighten, and not to shed a mere delusive 
radiance. 

If the Preacher was on the right road when he 
sought wisdom in the sense of the knowledge which 
is power, and gave himself to mirth, and withheld 
nothing from his eyes that they desired, and gained 
for himself a great estate and a large retinue to minister 
to his pleasure and his pride, Jesus was, beyond all 
question, utterly mistaken. To see how utterly mis- 
taken He was we need only to remember what He said 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 75 



about not laying up treasure, not exercising lordship 
over others, not desiring tokens of respect. It is still 
more apparent from what He was and what He did, 
what He suffered others to do to Him, what He 
thought good and what He thought bad, what He 
thought low and what He thought high. Above all, 
we see the difference in what He thought weak and 
what He thought strong. If aggressive might is really 
strong and love which suffers long and is kind is 
weak, He shed no light whatsoever upon the world, 
but was simply the most mistaken man who ever lived. 

Frequently, at least, He is thought wrong merely 
because His teaching is misunderstood, as though by 
love He meant a soft emotional way of living which 
makes us submit to the world's evils and oppressions. 
Not till we discern that it is a triumphant way of 
bearing ourselves which gives us victory over them, 
is it possible to see that He alone of men truly 
knew the world as God has really made it and 
manifested the one successful way of using it for 
the end for which God designed it. Nor till we 
make that discovery do we, in any right sense, 
believe that He came a light into it. 

Plainly there are two possibilities of mistake. We 
may be mistaken about the world, or we may be 
mistaken about Jesus. There is even a third possi- 
bility, the most likely of all. We may be mistaken 
both about the world and about Jesus: and perhaps 
no one who has ever seriously reflected upon both 
ever falls back upon a worldly valuation of the 



76 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 

world and the self-centred way of conquering it 
except by this double mistake. 

The wrong view depends on what we may call 
the iridescent idea of light, the idea of it as mere 
pleasing brightness. Not that in itself even this is 
wrong. On the contrary, in its right place and with 
deep enough thoughts to interpret it, it is wholly 
right and beautiful, and it may even be true and 
sublime. The artist, for example, does not use light 
merely to make visible his subject. Perhaps he fills 
his picture with light, but even then he uses it to 
set some things in brightness and some things in 
shade, to refresh your spirit with variety; and some- 
where on the horizon he fills a large open space 
with pure clear radiance to touch you to reverence 
with the sense of infinity. And in the very deepest 
way Jesus has come a light into the world after this 
manner. 

No effect of His presence in the world was more 
speedily apparent than the awakening in the human 
heart of a new range of emotions stirred by the new 
splendour shed on the more gracious aspects of 
human life; and perhaps it is not wrong to ascribe 
to Him also a new sense of the beauty and meaning 
even of the world of nature. Above all He calls forth 
in us a sense of the serenity and peace and measure- 
less depth of the heavens above our troubled earth, 
like those mysterious infinite depths which, even 
amid the storm wrack, shine in vast spaces of the 
far horizon. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 77 



Till he has thus ministered to our spirits some- 
thing of the splendour even of the soiled and 
troubled earth, and of the serenity even of the storm- 
rent heavens above it, and especially till He has 
shed a new glory on the face of every child of man, 
we have no response in us equal to any judgment 
of the true beauty of the world or the true dignity 
of our humanity. The light must be upon the world 
as it is, but till it touch our own hearts to respond 
to its appeal, the highest and best in it must remain 
meaningless or quite unknown. 

When we think, as those who deliberately reject 
Christ have thought, that the abiding good of the 
world consists in the things of pleasure and posses- 
sion and the using of others for the service of our 
desires and our self-exaltation, in the things which 
the Preacher found to be vanity and vexation of spirit, 
is it because they are our true good, or only because 
our souls, never having been touched to finer issues, 
have never seen life in the true light of the spirit? 

Yet even here the corruption of the best is the 
worst. It is easy to conceive of Christ as a light in 
the world in the form of mere cheering radiance, 
altering nothing and revealing nothing, as a mere 
comfortable way of thinking without any relation 
to the realities of life. To how many is that gilding 
of the face of reality the beginning and the end of 
religion, so that Jesus is to them ever a stained- 
glass window figure with shining halo, pleasing to 
turn aside on occasion to contemplate, but in no 



78 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 

sense revealing anything which makes the world a 
new creation ! 

How much of our religion is merely sentimental, 
concerned with emotional relaxations, and in no way 
with the stern business of living ! Yet Jesus Him- 
self is never sentimental and He never omitted 
anything from the scope of His religion or ever 
regarded it as less than victory over life's actual ills. 

While He promised that true belief in Him would 
enable us all our days and in every kind of duty to 
walk in light, He never promised that we should 
always walk in brightness. On the contrary He 
rather seems to have thought that His light would 
be of most profit and succour when it rose upon a 
world shattered and derelict. 

The light of Christ is not a mere way of sug- 
gesting cheerfulness to ourselves, as when frightened 
children in the night squeeze their eyes till they 
produce a kind of ghostly brightness, though they 
know well that the darkness around is still unaltered. 
The final purpose of light is just to enable you to 
see — nothing more and nothing less. It is peace, 
but only as our fears pass with the darkness, and 
security, but only as menacing shadow turns to re- 
freshing shade, and victory, but only as we discern 
all right ways of doing with the dawn. It sums up 
all we ought to include in salvation, yet only as the 
wanderer in the waste finds his way home because the 
sun has lit up the whole landscape till he can guide 
himself by all its features. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 79 

Directly light is not for your consolation and 
exaltation at all : and it may be far otherwise. When 
you are trying to save men from a wrecked ship 
and you wait in agony for the dawn, it is not to give 
you an artistic sense of a picturesque scene or the 
emotional satisfaction of a moving spectacle as it 
displays the seething ocean pouring over cramped 
figures clinging to broken cordage. You know it 
will wring your heart with new anguish, but you 
think nothing of that if it help you to bring the 
victims ashore. Is it not time that we thought less of 
our immediate feelings and realised Christ's coming 
as just such a harrowing light upon a scene of desola- 
tion to enable us to help in saving the crew of a 
shipwrecked world ? 

Never, in our time at least, have men longed for 
the dawn, through long winter nights, as they did 
in the trenches. Those at home often thought of 
the cold and the wet and the danger, but did they 
realise how terribly the hardship was increased 
simply by the horror of thick darkness? And yet 
the light only displayed the desolation and the 
danger. But in that very openness men found 
cheer and peace, and could once more smile and 
even sleep. And for brave men it will ever be so. 
They will ever desire above all else to see life as it 
really is and face the conflict and know their own 
place in it with a clear discernment of their duty; 
and they will fear no difficulty or danger if they are 
assured of not walking in darkness. 



8o THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



When the Church came to observe the season we 
now call Christmas as the anniversary of the coming 
of Jesus as a light into the world, it was neither be- 
cause of any ecclesiastical ruling nor of any tradition, 
but simply from a sense of the fitness of things. 
Christmas was just the ancient New Year, the first day 
of the visibly increasing light ; and they meant that His 
coming was to them the sure promise of the passing 
of the 'winter of their discontent/ 

To realise the feeling which directed this choice, 
we must not think of our warm well-lit firesides, 
with our books and busy social intercourse, but of 
an open-air people, whose houses were mere shelters, 
cold, imperfectly lit, inadequately weatherproof, in 
which, except among the very rich, there was little 
furniture and no books. Thus the winter nights 
were a long weariness and discomfort. Also we 
must take account of pagan superstitions about the 
struggle of the powers of light with the powers of 
darkness, which the lengthening day yearly proved 
to be decided in favour of the powers of light. 

But, still more, for our purpose, it is important 
that Jesus was first conceived as coming into the 
world on the day of the new light and that the 
custom of observing the day spread during years 
when the ancient civilisation was going down in ap- 
palling chaos and agony. Moreover men still knew 
what they were talking about when they spoke of the 
religion of Jesus, because it still stood so clearly over 
against the ancient paganism that they did not talk of 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 81 



Jesus when they meant Jupiter, as is only too common 
in our day. They knew that He meant a certain view 
of the world, a certain way of meeting its calamities, a 
certain course of conduct amid its perplexities, a certain 
kind of valuation of its good and its evil, a certain 
attitude of forbearance and forgiveness, in short, a 
certain way of being conquerors over life's ills and 
antagonisms. They conceived Him to be a light upon 
all God's strange doings, and a guidance, whereby, in 
the worst private calamity and public upheaval, they 
did not walk in darkness. 

Not perhaps in the same degree, but in a degree 
at least which gives every thoughtful person a sense 
of futility and sometimes of despair, we also are 
in need of light upon our time and our way in it. 
And if Christ is not a light in it, who is ? Certainly 
not those who preached the glory of the confident 
and the triumph of the strong! 

The first question concerns what this light truly 
is. To that there is a quite direct and simple answer. 
It concerns God's own notions about His own world, 
and how He rules it, and for what end. 

The testing issue is the relation of righteousness 
and reward. 

The history of revelation is, in essence, the 
history of this question. Even religious men began 
with the belief that God maintains the righteous in 
prosperity and only mocks the wicked with temporary 
illusions of success. In human justice this wrought 
out as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. 



o. s. 



6 



82 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



Only very slowly was it realised that this view was 
inconsistent with the facts of life and inadequate to 
our right relations one to another. With this negative 
conclusion went an increasing positive conviction 
that God's wisdom wrought with a larger vision, 
because it was determined by a love to men, not 
only more patient and more kind, but also more 
wise, than mere justice. This wrought out in practice 
in the devoted, self-forgetting labour of God's suffer- 
ing servant, who bore others' griefs and carried others' 
sorrows. 

But it was left to Jesus to deny, by all He was as 
well as all He said, the whole idea of justice which 
conceived God as a Potentate who governs the 
world on strict commercial principles of obedience 
and reward. Still more it was left to Jesus to manifest 
the rule of God as the direction of a Father whose 
loving care no ingratitude, disobedience or impiety 
could ever alienate. Above all it was left to Him to 
require of us the practical working out of this view 
by the kindness to the unthankful and evil which 
is nothing less than the reflection of the Father's 
perfection. 

This principle regulated His whole ministry from 
the Jordan to Calvary, determining both His thoughts 
of God and His relations to men. It is the essence of 
what He means by the Rule or Kingdom of God, 
and of the meaning of the Cross as the last and 
highest task in manifesting the good news of this 
Kingdom. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 83 

As the Cross has often been presented, it is not 
light but gloom, which justifies the passionate 
hatred of the dark shadow it has cast on life. If it 
preaches hope at all, it is for another world than this, 
and that for quite arbitrary reasons. Ruskin speaks 
in Modern Painters of a morbid tendency in 
Romanism towards the contemplation of bodily 
pain 'owing to the attribution of saving power to 
it,' which, he thinks, has left its stain even on the 
highest Roman painters, so that even Fra Angelico 
'always insists weakly on bodily torture, and is 
unsparing of blood/ But, though it may not have 
the same visible embodiment, this same insistence, 
and for the same reason, is by no means confined 
to the Roman painters. Whensoever the Cross 
ceases to be light on this world and becomes a 
device for securing an entrance into another, stress 
must be laid on the weakness and not the strength, 
on the agony and not the victory. It ceases to be 
what it was for Jesus, a surrender to the will of the 
Father which fulfils all righteousness by manifesting, 
with unquenchable joy, the eternal and invincible 
ways of His pardon and love, and becomes mere 
abjectness of submission amid defeat and agony 
and death. But how is that a light by which anyone 
can ever steer, with courage undismayed and hope 
undimmed, his sure course amid life's rocks and 
tides ? 

The true meaning of the Cross is, in the first 
place, a great denial. It denies emphatically that 

6—2 



84 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 

the end of God's rule in the world is the punishing 
of the wicked and the rewarding of the righteous. 
It denies that any illuminating thought of life's 
meaning, any clear guidance on our own way through 
life can ever come to us on that principle, for it is 
not God's way. 

The Cross also is a great affirmation that God's 
purpose is the salvation of His children into His 
Kingdom, the peace and glory and possessions of 
which only love can win, and for which only by love 
can anyone be won. 

Let us, whatsoever we do, not accept this merely 
piously. Was a life in which this view of God's 
rule shone without ever flickering or showing dim 
really a light come into the world ? Is that truly how 
God has made the world and how we may possess 
it? Nothing less is at stake. Do not delude your- 
selves about the issue. Rather deny it point blank 
and affirm vehemently that it is an illusion, and that 
the only reason for doing right is to be well paid 
for it, and that the way of success for men or 
nations is to fight well for their own hand. That is 
far better than to reverence Jesus with our lips and 
then go and live on the principle of hating those 
who hate us, and doing to them as we think they 
would have done to us, and measuring our security 
by power and our worth by position and human 
approbation. 

If Christ is come a light into the world, it can 
only be because He manifests the eternal principles 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 85 



of God's rule in it. Seeing they are eternal principles, 
they cannot be adequately wrought out in time; and 
if they are such that, in defeat and agony and 
death, they can still make us more than conquerors, 
quite obviously defeat and death cannot be the end. 
Yet eternal principles are not merely for eternity, 
but there can be no time or place in which they are 
not valid. If we think there is any time or place in 
which we may not safely stake our souls on them and 
entrust to their working all our interests private or 
public, the idea that we believe in Christ is mere 
illusion, and, if He is light, we are in darkness. 

Let us take a practical illustration. When Jesus 
tells us that, if we forgive not men their trespasses, 
neither will our Heavenly Father forgive us, He is 
not setting a limit to God's mercy. He is merely 
pointing out a necessity which belongs to the nature 
of light, the necessity of walking in it if we would 
not stumble and would catch the promise of its far 
horizons. He is pointing out that pardoning love, 
with the esteem of God for His children which gives 
it meaning, is not merely edifying to contemplate, but 
is God's actual method of rule outside of which it 
cannot be well with us. If forgiveness is God's way, 
we cannot be stronger or better or more secure or 
have better success by refusing to forgive others. 

Let us come back to this, that Jesus is either a 
light in the world to show us God's mind respecting 
it, or He is the most mistaken person who ever 
lived. If He does not reveal God's real way of 



86 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



ruling the world and our own real way of ruling 
our lives so as to possess the world, the sooner we 
seek some other guide the better. He is light only 
if, under the eyelids of its dawn, God's unchanging 
purpose is beginning at least to appear above the 
distorting mists and shadows of man's hatreds and 
violence and selfishness. That is the question; and 
we answer it, not as we cherish the hope of bliss 
in another world, but as we find it now the power 
of an endless life, applicable to all tasks and problems 
and to all human relations, private and public, 
national and international, because it displays the 
certain and undeniable and irresistible principles 
of God's rule in earth and heaven. If it is light, 
it must, as light does, lighten all. It can be no 
light of God unless it show us the right measure 
of good and the right temper and motive of duty, 
the right valuation of our fellow-men, the right way 
of solving our social problems, the right governance 
of our states, the right and secure relations between 
peoples. In short, it must illumine for us every- 
thing that concerns right thinking and right acting. 
Its proof is the unveiling of reality, and not merely 
edifying, comforting and pious feeling: and if it 
display the way in which God manages His world, 
it must be the only way in which you, or any other 
mortal, can ever walk in the world except in darkness. 

' If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do 
them'; for it is vain to talk of belief in Christ, if 
worldly cares still devastate your peace, if you think 
crookedness may be wrong but is the way to success, 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 87 



if material guarantees for your lives seem a better 
security than the witness of a good conscience, if 
the service of personal ambition draws you more 
than the service even of the unthankful and evil, 
if the putting of your enemies into strait-waistcoats 
seems a better way of securing the peace of the 
world than bringing them to sanity and friendship. 

We cannot look at the Master's life and assume 
that our path will be smooth and our journey easy. 
But, if He often walked in distress, He never walked 
in darkness. All righteousness He fulfilled with 
perfect discernment and absolute loyalty, using 
every opportunity to the full and meeting everyone 
with perfect sympathy, understanding and pardon 
of all offences. And, if we have anything of His 
spirit, what greater blessing could we desire than 
thus to abide in the light as He is in the light ? What 
road should we fear to tread, if we knew it certainly 
to be the right way, the way of God's mind in our 
troubled time and of God's victory when time's 
purposes shall have been fulfilled? 

Most of us perhaps, like the prophets, feel that 
we live in a time that is darkness and not light. 
Confusion and distress fall upon our spirits as we 
realise that we do not know even how to begin to 
cast out the devils of hatred and suspicion, to feed 
the hungry and minister to the desolate, to introduce 
a new reign of brotherhood and peace. But is it 
because light has not come into the world or because 
evil passions and worldly ambitions blind our eyes 



88 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



to it, and unworthy fears hinder us from trusting its 
guidance? Might we not soon see our way, were 
our one fixed purpose to walk in the light, to see in 
Jesus God's absolute mind about life and our duty in 
it? Light makes just one demand — faith to walk in 
it. That means ruthless sincerity and, above all, 
sincerity with our own empty, gushing, unreal words 
and forms. Nor can aught else be the supreme demand, 
if Jesus has really come a light into our world and 
if we are so to believe in Him that we shall no longer 
abide in darkness. 



VII 



A PANACEA 

John xiv. 8. 'Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.' 

Philip's question is usually esteemed a mere crude 
misunderstanding. Into the midst of his Master's 
discourse on the deepest things of faith he strikes 
in with a gross demand for the help of sight. With 
his natural eyes in some way he would see God. 
Then he would be satisfied, but not till then. 

Yet there are reasons for pausing before accepting 
this estimate. Philip was a Jew who had been 
taught from childhood that no man had seen God 
at any time; he had been chosen one of the twelve, 
surely for something more than common spiritual 
insight; and, in Peter's words, he had companied 
with them all the time the Lord Jesus went in and 
out among them, surely to some profit. 

Nor is there any suggestion of pain, not to speak 
of rebuke, in the Master's reply, as there must 
have been had the meaning of His own words been 
grossly perverted from seeing the Father with the 
eye of faith into seeing Him with the eye of flesh. 
Nor would the misunderstanding have been only of 
this teaching, but would have marked the Master's 
overwhelming failure to impress aright in any way 
even His own most intimate followers. 



9o 



A PANACEA 



Yet Jesus merely appeals to their fellowship 
together, which, on this supposition, had been so 
utterly fruitless ; and the substance of what He says 
is to assure Philip that he already possesses what he 
thinks he needs. 'He that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father, and how sayest thou then, Shew us the 
Father ?' 

The key to Philip's meaning is the words, 'it 
sufficeth us,' because the measure of his behest is 
the terrible experience for which it was to suffice. 
The shepherd was to be smitten and the sheep 
scattered abroad. The presence of the Master, which 
had been hitherto all their strength, was to be 
withdrawn. Like lone children they were to be 
pushed out into the night where faces scowled in 
the dim light and dangers lurked in every shadow, 
and the storm gathered, and where, they had just 
been told, the bravest of them would quail and 
utterly come short in loyalty and truth. 

Jesus had gone on to say, 'Let not your heart 
be troubled'; but, after what He had told them, it 
must have seemed like asking the impossible. If 
they were thus to be tried and to fail in the trial, 
how could their hearts be other than overwhelmed 
by trouble ? Could they have been assured of playing 
a worthy part, they might have steeled their hearts 
to bear, but, with even that hope denied them, was 
it not mockery to say, 'Let not your heart be 
troubled'? If, nevertheless, Philip could say, 'It 
sufficeth us,' surely he had found a solid ground of 



A PANACEA 



91 



faith and seen a great vision of hope in what Jesus 
had gone on to say. 

'Ye believe in God/ Yes, they could all reply, 
they always had believed in God. The future, they 
knew, could not be wholly dark, if the last word 
was with God and not with man. 

Yet for their own private lives God seemed too 
remote to be a present succour and too much the 
embodiment of mere righteousness to be a consola- 
tion in their sin and failure. Moreover, belief 
depended too much on abstractions and probabilities 
to sustain them in face of evils so real, so visible. 
Thus for what actually lay before them, no one 
could say belief in God would suffice. 

But Jesus continued, I have meant for you another 
knowledge of God and another way of knowing. 
He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father — a 
Father in a home with many mansions, one of them 
reserved for Peter with his triple denial. 

Then, like a flash, it came home to Philip that 
here was a security which would suffice even for 
the day when the Master should be gone from their 
midst, their company be broken up, their cause 
discredited and each of them left standing alone 
against a hostile world, bearing heavy responsibilities 
and with grave failures to be made good. Could 
he, like Jesus, see the Father in all this world of 
time and chance, tracing His love in every adversity, 
hearing His word of forgiveness in every passion 
of hatred, and looking, as he had looked in the 



9 2 



A PANACEA 



Master's face, for recovery even in remorse and the 
shipwreck of human confidence, it would suffice for 
all that might befall. 

Philip's prayer is then no cry of a darkened and 
material mind, a mind determined to walk by sight 
and not by faith, a mind belonging to the adulterous 
generation that sought after a sign, but is the deep 
and spiritual utterance of a heart knowing its own 
weakness and discerning its true succour. And our 
Lord's answer, though in the form of a question, 
is a tender and gracious assurance that, in their 
fellowship together, Philip's prayer had been already 
answered, and that he need no more ask for what 
he already possessed. 

Philip, like so many of the rest of us, was in 
trouble only because he had failed to discover and 
use the privileges he already enjoyed. As argument 
could at best have confirmed the belief in God, 
Jesus simply led him back to their experience 
together. Then Philip knew that he had already 
seen a vision which had transformed for him the 
world. Cloud and lake and tillage field and wayside 
flower became eloquent of the Father's care; the 
equal rain told of the Father's love and pardon to 
His erring sons; the play of children and the daily 
tasks of men and life's joys and sorrows mirrored 
the Father's Kingdom; even the faces of the sinful 
and lost were in the Father's image. What was yet 
lacking in the revelation a day or two would com- 
plete, when he would see the will of the Father 



A PANACEA 



93 



done in agony of body and soul, but in a spirit which 
transformed every evil which life could pour upon 
the head of the righteous into the patient, pardoning 
love of the Father. 

Even to believe in God seemed to many in days 
of desolation and slaughter an impossible achieve- 
ment. Yet only by belief in God is it possible for 
any one to burn through an evil time for his brethren, 
as was said of Cromwell, 'like a fiery pillar of hope/ 

In the might of armies and the policies of states- 
men our confidence never can be more than straw 
which blazes up in the dry and favouring breeze 
and dies down in the lashing storm. If there is 
no God, we are, in face of unjust might and blind 
accident, without hope in the world. This we have 
learned as we never knew in a pleasant, easy, 
prosperous time when things went so well with us 
that a world without God seemed as secure as a 
world with God, and belief in a benevolent Being 
behind it was as easy as it was unimportant. When 
a world without God is not benevolent at all; when 
it is a ghastly slaughter-house caused by insane 
ambitions, and brutal violences, and base lust of 
gain; when it may be subjected to the triumph of 
cunning and strength, with destruction of all that 
is tender and beautiful and human and free and just; 
when the issue may be a cowering, servile, withered 
race to people a graveyard of a world, the value 
of a world with God begins to appear. In face of 
such possibilities we would rejoice to believe in a 



94 



A PANACEA 



God even of the sternest righteousness. 'To Him/ 
says the Psalmist, ' belongeth mercy, for He rendereth 
to every man according to his works/ As we look 
out upon the works of iniquity, we can understand 
how judgment may be mercy, not only to the 
sufferer, but even to the sinner. 

But also, when we really face such issues of 
possible human evil, we know that, in spite of 
everything, we believe in God. We do not believe 
that policies and armies finally determine the destiny 
of humanity, and that the true and gracious and 
holy things have no might, and that the last word 
of wisdom can be statecraft and the last weight in 
the scales of the future iron shards. We know that, 
however long our patience may still be tried, the 
end is not yet, and that it will not be according to 
the violence of man, but according to the purpose 
of God. In spite of all, nay, because of all, we believe 
in God, and it means the difference between a world 
with our souls hardly bested and hungry and a 
world in which hope maketh not ashamed. 

But who in such days could say, Let us believe 
in God and it sufBceth us? Who, indeed, can say 
it in any day? The might of evil is too visible and 
near for mere belief; we share in it too deeply to 
trust only the final triumph of righteousness; our 
conflict is too immediate and personal to allow us 
to wait patiently the working of God: the urgency 
of the present task does not allow us to judge it 
only by God's final end. But in face of the true 



A PANACEA 95 



reality of war, our need, if not greater, is more 
insistent. 

As of all events in time, war concerns the hopes 
and fears, the joys and sorrows, the sublime thoughts 
and the mean, the fellowships and the desolations 
of human hearts. We learned to think in millions 
of what was lived through by individuals, and even 
of the millions we lost count. Yet each soldier on 
either side left a useful, peaceful avocation and a 
cheerful fireside, and his mother or his wife, his 
sisters or his children hung about his neck as he 
departed; and now he moulders in the chalk of 
Flanders, where no man knows, and his chair he 
will never fill again, and there will be a void in the 
hearts that loved him to the end of time. And how 
shall we measure the sacred associations of homes 
going up in flames, and women and children fleeing 
wildly amid shell and bullet that pursue retreating 
armies, or mothers watching their children dying 
while hunger gnaws at their own vitals. Nor may 
we forget the dreary days of captivity, the terrible 
pressure which drives reason from her throne, or 
the men who must face life again, maimed and 
broken. 

For all that agony of body and spirit what would 
suffice? Have we any answer except Philip's ? Lord, 
show us the Father, without whom none of these 
many dead have fallen, none of these many homes 
been made desolate, none of these frames quivered 
in pain, none of these bitter tears been shed. Show us 



9 6 



A PANACEA 



that the sighing of the prisoner has come up into His 
ear, that He has put the tears of the widow and the 
orphan into His bottle, that He has led the blind by 
a way that they knew not, that He has truly borne 
our griefs and carried our sorrows. 

The wages of sin must be death; evil must work 
out its own disaster. God's gifts for life, being 
misused, become messengers of death; the society 
He meant for His Kingdom can be turned into the 
tyranny of darkness. Human responsibility can 
prove its appalling significance by working evil; 
the brotherhood of man can be turned into organised 
destruction. Yet if we could see that it is the very 
reverence of the Father for His own image in His 
children which suffers them, in the exercise of the 
responsibility He has given them, to work these 
calamities, but that, in their evil-doing, He continues 
kind, even to the unthankful and evil, and that there 
is no soul of man He does not pity and love, and 
for which He has not an eternal purpose worthy of 
all the discipline of life's agony and death's despair, 
would it not suffice us? 

Argument at best would help us to believe in 
God, and even then only with the fainting cry, 
'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.' Would 
we see the Father, is there any way except to follow 
Him who set His face steadfastly to go up to 
Jerusalem, there to tread the winepress alone in 
agony and bloody sweat, and be despised and 
rejected of men, and robed with purple in mockery 



A PANACEA 



97 



and crowned with thorns, and be nailed to the Cross 
of shame, and suffer all the pangs mortal frame can 
undergo, and all the darkness that can fall upon 
the fainting spirit, to reveal the Father in every 
horror of body and soul that man can undergo, in 
doing His will, obedient unto death? 

In these days still He too may be going before in 
solemn silence, with the shadow of events darkening 
His brow, and we may be amazed and as we follow 
be afraid; and a heavy fear may be upon us that we 
too may fail Him in the great day of decision. But 
even so we may be seeing the Father and learning 
that neither life nor death nor any created thing shall 
separate us from His love, and that in the end we shall 
be more than conquerors through Him who loved us, 
and that our Fathers house has still many mansions 
into which shall be garnered all we have sown in 
tears, whither we shall come bringing our sheaves 
with us, ay, even if they have in them the tares and 
thistles of our doubts and our denials. 



o. s. 



7 



VIII 



A DISTRESSED MIND AND 
UNTROUBLED HEART 

John xiv. I. 'Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, 

believe also in me.' 
Mark xiv. 33. 'And he taketh with him Peter and James and 

John, and began to be greatly amazed, and sore troubled.' 

These incidents both belong to the few hours 
between the defection of Judas and the actual 
betrayal. In both Jesus is alone with His disciples, 
facing the same terrible prospect of His own agony 
and their desertion. But this nearness in time and 
similarity in outward situation only render more 
amazing the contrast in inward mood. In one, the 
disciples are filled with dismay, while Jesus is calm 
and assured, with abundant peace, not alone for 
His own need, but also for all who trust Him: in 
the other, His dearest companions are dull of appre- 
hension and heavy with sleep, while Jesus, in His 
dismay, vainly casts Himself upon their sympathy, 
confessing that His soul is exceeding sorrowful, even 
unto death. 

The whole difference has been ascribed to John's 
peculiar view of Jesus. But he also admits that Jesus 
was troubled in spirit, or, as we should say, in 
mind; and he is not alone in thinking that Jesus 



A DISTRESSED MIND 



came to give peace. Mark, no more than John, 
doubted that Jesus gave victory over fear as well as 
over sin. And, apart from either, faith in Jesus as 
a refuge in distress has never been separated from 
the knowledge that He himself passed through the 
depths of dismay. He was acquainted with grief 
in His soul as well as in His life, being no more 
shielded from its distress in mind than in body. 
Nor would He avail for our need, had He not, in 
every sense, undergone our experience. 

Suffering, nevertheless, is not victory. That depends 
wholly on how it is endured. Had Jesus faced His 
trials, as many descriptions of Him might lead us 
to suppose, as a soft, sensitive person, shrinking 
from life's rough experiences, forgetful of its joys 
and brooding much on its miseries, keenly but 
passively enduring its cruelties and its wrongs, He 
could have been no Captain in any warfare. Nor 
is He so represented in the Gospels. 

Even the Crucifixion must be wrongly conceived 
when the dying Christ is pictured with nothing in 
His face except abject, awful, unresisting anguish. 
He must have died as He had lived, as the greatest 
of all fighters in the battle between light and 
darkness, life and death, heaven and hell. However 
His mortal flesh and human spirit were broken by 
agony, as His heart did not turn back, there must 
have shone on His dying face the glory and peace 
of victory. Paul, at least, could speak of it as a 
conflict triumphantly maintained to the end, the 

7 —2 



A DISTRESSED MIND 



pain e,ndured, consciously and willingly, and the 
shame despised, actively and forcefully, not in 
passive misery, but for the joy set before Him. 

If, throughout His life, Jesus was a man of sorrows 
of a depth we may never fathom, His pure spirit 
must also have had joys to which we cannot soar. 
We catch glimpses of it in His delight in nature 
and children and the ways of man, in His supreme 
insight into the only book He perhaps had much 
opportunity of reading, in the quietness and absence 
of hurry amid the tumult of His days, and above all 
in the serenity and security of His fellowship with 
the Father. He nursed no trouble and cherished 
no grief. He knew no ills which are only evil 
because we think them so. He brooded on no fears 
and anticipated no troubles. His days were not 
darkened even by the Cross, till He stood in its 
shadow. Life He met with a hardened body and 
disciplined mind, which enabled Him to take 
privations, dangers, oppositions, misrepresentations, 
as what Chalmers the missionary used to call, 'the 
pepper and salt of life/ Having the joy of a great 
cause and the concentration of a great purpose, 
He was never the victim of trivial anxieties or mean 
worries or small annoyances, to which men are 
exposed by unworthy aims and ungirt loins. 

In reaction from the mistaken gloom of former 
views, Jesus has more recently been pictured as a 
cheerful, delightful person, the incarnation of 
geniality, with an easy, humorous way of disposing 



AND UNTROUBLED HEART 101 



of difficulties, and with charming grace of manner 
and superiority to all austerity. Being a very human 
picture, there is no temptation to make Jesus 
mentally any more than physically superior to 
sufferings, either by impassiveness, as Christian 
Science, or by omnipotence, as some theologies. 
If physical evil has no reality, neither has moral; 
and this view makes plain that our Lord's solution, 
whatever it may have been, had nothing to do 
with denying the appalling reality of either. Yet, 
even with this recognition of graver issues, while it 
is of value for reminding us of important elements 
in the life of Jesus which have too often been over- 
looked, does this presentation altogether do justice 
to the intensity of His conflict and the absoluteness 
of His demands? Above all is it adequate to the 
dark, tremendous judgment of men and things, 
through which He travels to victory? After no 
manner, not even the manner of geniality, does He 
hold out any hope of peace with life as good in 
itself and by itself. 

On this immediate judgment of life Buddha's 
view of it as misery is true; and Jesus knew this 
better than Buddha. The higher the life, the more 
responsive the feeling and the intenser the sym- 
pathies; and, therefore, the more it is exposed to 
pain. 

Even of bodily suffering this is true. A higher 
mind creates for itself a finer organisation with 
keener sensibilities, while a coarser mind has duller 



io2 A DISTRESSED MIND 



sensations. As Carlyle puts it, 'Stupidity and a 
good digestion can face much/ Even an excitable 
mind in a high-strung body has ways of escaping 
anguish not open to a mind of perfect balance and 
sanity in a body under perfect discipline and healthy 
control. We read of martyrs with feelings so exalted 
as to make them unconscious even of the flames; 
and some have argued that Jesus was less heroic 
than they because nothing of the kind shielded 
Him from agony. 

But it is neither the bravest nor the most experi- 
enced soldier whom excitement renders impervious 
to danger. For this way of escape Jesus was too strong 
and self-possessed, too inflexibly resolute in facing 
reality, and, above all, too familiar with conflict. 
Thus, neither by hardness nor by exaltation, was 
anything human flesh or spirit could endure ever 
softened for Him. Nor can we realise what it meant 
for Him to endure to the end in fulfilling all 
righteousness, unless we perceive with what clear 
consciousness and with what revolt of His healthy, 
sane, sensitive nature, He faced it. 

And to this agony of body consider what was 
added of anguish of mind. Though it could not 
silence His prayer that they might be forgiven, 
the hatred of those He would have saved wrapped 
Him like a flame. Though their iniquity was 
directed against Himself, the disasters His per- 
secutors were preparing for themselves and their 
children wrung His soul with grief. Though it 



AND UNTROUBLED HEART 103 



could not make Him fail to pity their distress and 
weakness, the desertion of his disciples left Him a 
lonely object of universal scorn. Finally, though it 
could not sap His confidence in commending His 
spirit into the hands of His Father, as body and 
mind were broken in agony, He felt forsaken of 
God. 

In those hours miseries were heaped upon Him 
such as neither Buddha, nor any other mortal, ever 
experienced, or perhaps had the strength of mind con- 
sciously to endure. Yet He drank this bitter cup to 
the dregs as appointed by the love of the Father who 
is altogether good, and as, therefore, in the deepest 
sense also good. Through the most utter outward 
defeat, the most cruel and shameful execution devised 
for the basest criminals, with agony in every nerve 
and black darkness upon His mind, He yet dreamt 
of no Nirvana, no cessation of being and pain. He 
did not even dwell on Heaven as bliss after this 
warfare should have been accomplished, but the joy 
set before Him was a present as well as an invincible 
good, for which He was glad to live and ready to die. 
From the work given Him to do He never turned 
His eyes, and nothing necessary for accomplishing 
it ever ceased to be a joy. 

But, you may ask, was not every element of joy, 
whether of duty done or of serving His brethren 
or of manifesting His Father, blotted out when 
He uttered the despairing cry, ' My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me ' ? 



io 4 A DISTRESSED MIND 



To many it has appeared that this shadowing 
of the face of the Father may not be ascribed merely 
to the agony of the Crucifixion, without regarding 
the faith of Jesus as weaker than that of such human 
martyrs as Stephen whose last hours were illumined 
by more than mortal vision of heavenly succour. 
They, therefore, think it necessary to find some 
other explanation : and two explanations have specially 
found favour. 

The first ascribes it to a supernatural, collective, 
representative heaping of the world's sin upon His 
head, under which, as our substitute, He endured 
such a shadow of the wrath of God as hid from Him 
the Father's face. 

But the world's sin is a moral and personal 
responsibility, and not a massed collective shadow. 
Nor has such a way of solving a moral problem 
any agreement with the mind of the Father as 
Jesus revealed it. Above all, this view has not a 
vestige of support from anything in the narrative, 
though, if it had been a reality, it ought to have 
been the dominant feature. 

The other explains the words as an unfinished 
quotation from the Twenty-second Psalm. Though 
His dying lips could fashion no more words, they 
show that His heart was dwelling on such assurances 
as, 'They trusted in Thee and were not ashamed,' 
on such prayers as, ' Be not far off, O Lord : O Thou, 
my succour, haste Thee to my help,' and on such 
promises as, 'Let your heart live forever. All the 



AND UNTROUBLED HEART 105 

ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto 
the Lord.' Yet the words are there by themselves, 
and it is difficult to suppose that those who reported 
them thought them other than a cry from the 
depths; and when we recall how, even as He 
entered the shadow, He had acknowledged His 
soul sore troubled even unto death, we cannot be 
sure that they were not, just by themselves, the dark 
centre of His conscious thought. It is the only say- 
ing on the Cross the Evangelists thought necessary 
to hand down in the original Aramaic tongue. They 
added neither expansion nor explanation, thinking 
either that it needed none or was beyond it. And, if 
we take it as they did, must it not be as a cry 
from the great darkness which had wrapped for the 
moment His anguished mind, to which we must add 
nothing and in which we must explain nothing, but 
accept them simply as expressing the most terrible 
experience of His awful ordeal. And had He escaped 
that moment of desolation, would He have truly 
sounded all the depths of man's darkness and lone- 
liness and desolation? 

And, yet, when all this has been said, we have 
not wholly done away with the significance of the 
fact that this cry of dismay is a quotation from a 
Psalm of assurance and hope, for there is nothing 
more marvellous in the mind than the penumbra 
of light which may surround the blackest centre of 
eclipse. Does it not show that the sun of His faith still 
shone behind, His heart still at peace though His 



io6 A DISTRESSED MIND 



mind was overshadowed? God was still the great 
reality and was still His God, and though like a child 
in the night He had lost His hand, like a child 
also He stretched forth His arm, to find again its 
strengthening hold. 

In what is merely the human spirit there is a 
breaking point of endurance, as well as in what is 
merely the mortal body. To ascribe to John a 
definite and absolute distinction between the heart 
which the faith of Christ can guard from trouble, 
and the mind from which it could not be excluded 
even by Jesus Himself, may be too much of a 
refinement. Definite and absolute walls of separa- 
tion in our nature, we, at least, cannot discover. 
Yet, in our strange, complex, closely inter-related 
being, there must be some sharp dividing line 
between our mortal and our immortal part. This 
latter is what the New Testament calls the heart; and 
its chrysalis, both of body and of mind, may include 
more of our nature than we realise. Yet we are 
not wholly without experience of an utter breaking 
of our powers which are revealing moments of 
something in us neither to be broken nor dismayed. 

A soldier after years spent in the hottest parts 
of India went in winter straight to France. There 
he spent fifty-two hours in a trench filled with 
freezing water, and under a fire which scarce 
permitted of any movement. He was in the hospital 
suffering, from the effect of it, days shot through 
with intense pain and nights of fitful snatches of 



AND UNTROUBLED HEART 107 



sleep broken by almost unendurable pangs. After 
he had told of the horrible long nightmare of it, 
he added : " But I am glad to have gone through 
it; I am glad to have lived to have this experience; 
I am glad to know what man can endure." He 
did not mean that he was proud to have borne so 
much now that it was over. It was still very far 
from being over. Nor was there in his mind the 
dimmest thought of boasting. What he did mean 
was that he had passed through one of life's great 
unveiling experiences which had revealed to him, 
away down in his soul, deeper than his heavily 
distressed conscious mind, something which had not 
been troubled. This it is which may rest unshaken 
on the Eternal, even while all conscious thought is 
blackness of desolation. 

All else in our nature can be broken, and the 
breaking of it with few — and these not the strongest 
— is with ecstasy. The common experience is like 
the Master's own, of falling backwards into the 
abyss, with all supports of God and man removed 
from under us. Yet this is a thing wholly of nature, 
as much as the empty rent shell from which the 
butterfly has escaped; and that our Lord shared it 
with us is the final proof that He fully partook 
of our humanity. 

But, while He suffered without and within all 
we can endure, and that with a specially poignant 
distress, He never turned His face from life, or 
resented God's appointment for Him in it, or 



io8 A DISTRESSED MIND 



thought it aimless or senseless misery, or desired 
to escape from it into a passionless existence. 
Though for the moment His conscious thought was 
a black desolation, deep in His heart was the shining 
light of a psalm of hope and assurance and the 
turning of man to God, the joy of it immediately 
blazing up into confident surrender of His spirit 
into the Father's hands. And where else may our 
faith plant its last tottering footstep as we ascend 
through the storm and darkness of time to the light 
and peace of the life eternal; where else can we 
rest assured that there is no ill over which the 
Cross is not God's victory, and no way so dark as 
to be deprived of His peace, except in that dismayed 
but finally triumphant question ? 

In the prosperous days when even Christian 
people could think of God's peace as something 
akin to worldly ease, we used to be told of a higher 
faith which would save us from all distress, at 
least of spirit. But where da we read of it in the 
life of any prophet or saint or hero of faith ? In the 
life of the Master Himself was He made immune 
by faith any more than by hardness or by omni- 
potence? In the intensity of their conflict the greatest 
of His followers spoke of the righteous scarcely being 
saved, of being saved yet so as by fire, of coming 
through only after succumbing in battles both of the 
flesh and the spirit; and the Master Himself did not 
escape dismay and the shadow of a great darkness. 

When we begin to define and explain, we too 



AND UNTROUBLED HEART 109 



easily descend to the things merely of the mind and 
fail to rise to the issues of the heart. Then what 
we say of Christ as power to make us, in face even 
of suffering and weakness and darkness, glad to live 
and ready to die, is often crude and always in- 
adequate, giving a wrong and superficial and im- 
mediate and even material impression of what we take 
life's real good, as well as death's real hope, to be. 
But the heart can know what the mind cannot explain, 
and it knows that, even if the flesh be crushed and 
the spirit broken, it itself may not be troubled, but 
can rejoice unwaveringly still to live, and, as part of 
life, to die, confidently commending itself, even in its 
rebellion and weakness and darkness, into God's 
hands, knowing that no evil, no defeat, no despair 
can hinder life from being the joyful gift of the Most 
High to the children He has made in His own 
image, and that, through it, they may realise His 
blessed will in victory and peace, and find death the 
last and highest triumph of life. 



IX 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 

Romans viii. 28. 'And we know that all things work together for 
good to them that love God, to them who are the called 
according to his purpose.' 

There is a method in literature by which thoughts 
which are dominant in a writer's mind are made 
apparent, which is known as 4 'the method of 
recurrences and fervours." That is to say, we judge 
by the frequency and intensity with which the idea 
is repeated in various forms. On this test the 
thought in our text must have been, in a high 
degree, both central and continuous in the mind 
of the Apostle. Here it is obviously the intensest 
expression of a very intense mood. And, when he 
expresses the same thought in other ways, it is 
always the same. 'With Christ God freely gives us 
all things.' 'All things are yours, for ye are Christ's 
and Christ is God's.' 'All things are of God who 
reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ.' 
Nor could an experience of Christ which thus 
gave meaning and value to all experience do other 
than rule his thoughts and colour all his emotions. 

Yet the world in itself was to him still an evil 
dominion, and life in it was not less than before a 
burden and a sorrow; and he is well aware that, on 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 1 1 1 



the ordinary estimate, what he says is nothing more 
than sheer paradox. Unless it is seen as an illumina- 
tion, it must seem an absurdity. He knows that he 
is making the most unlikely affirmation, about the 
most unlikely people, and for the most unlikely 
reason. But he also knows that what he calls 
reconciliation turns it from an incredible paradox 
into the most triumphant certainty. At enmity with 
God, all the world is against us; at peace with Him, 
all of it is on our side. 

I. It IS THE MOST UNLIKELY AFFIRMATION 

4 We know that all things work together for good.' 

The utmost that the most cheerful, hopeful, 
optimistic human opinion has ventured to maintain 
about the world is that it is, for those who know 
how to make the best of it, pretty good upon the 
whole. Even when it has been called the best of 
all possible worlds, a large, uncomfortable margin 
has to be allowed for as inexplicable. 

But the world, in this sense, is not, for the 
Apostle, good even in a moderate degree. It is 
the place into which we come naked and alone, and 
out of which again we go naked and alone. All our 
journey through it, defend ourselves as we may, 
we remain open to assault; and, surround ourselves 
with friends as we may, we are alone in the depths 
of our hearts. To trust in anything working for 
our good in the way of mere possession and material 
security is to make a god of this world: and no 



ii2 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



other delusion so shuts us off from real trust in God 
or from any need of learning His mind. Paul even 
affirms that his gospel never is hid except as this 
kind of trust, which he calls the god of this world, 
has blinded men's eyes. To him, as to his Lord, 
the ruler of this world — the world so conceived — 
is the Father of Lies, the supreme source of all 
self-delusion. To build our hopes on the promise 
of it is to prove ourselves fools, because it does 
not work even imperfectly, and much less all of 
it together, for good. 

Faith is not blindness to life's uncertainties and 
miseries. Until faith in providence as mere benefi- 
cence breaks down, the faith which reconciles us 
to God in face of every conceivable evil cannot 
arise. But, then, nothing whatsoever in the world 
is omitted from what works together for good. 

This does not, however, mean that all life is 
forthwith made happy or in any way good in itself. 
Creation still groans and travails, and those who 
have God's peace in their souls do not least share 
in its pain. The good for which the world works 
is not the world itself. It no more makes the world 
good by itself than ploughing, as mere tearing up 
the soil, would be good without the harvest, or 
quarrying, as mere breaking up stones, would be 
good without building them into houses. So with 
experience. Only in view of its final purpose is it 
good at all, but, directed to that end, none of it 
can finally be hurtful. For this higher good it all 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 113 



works together, so that, however calamitous in itself, 
it is blessed in its effect. Nor is it good merely by the 
preponderance of the pleasant things we cherish, 
but the unpleasant things we shun have equally their 
place. 

Health and prosperity and youth and repute and 
friendship and good success we are all ready to 
admit as on our side. But now the claim is that 
they are not a whit more friendly to our lasting and 
supremely worthy good than the most painful, most 
uncertain, most calamitous events. This was the 
victory which overcame the world, and, as it left 
nothing that could be against us, it manifestly was a 
crowning triumph. 

The change is so great that all things become 
new. The world is a new creation. Yet the only 
really new element is the discovery of God's un- 
changing meaning in it and purpose with it. It is 
new only as a lesson is new when it ceases to burden 
us as a task and begins to stir our imagination as 
poetry, or as a message is new when, read by the 
right code, it changes from chaotic words to rational 
meaning. 

The worldly view is one code, and the Christian 
view is another. The former works with pleasures 
and possessions and what is usually regarded as the 
good things of life. With the best effort, the result 
is mixed and contradictory, yet, so long as people 
have health and ease and fair prosperity, and life's 
drift seems to be according to the meanings they 

o. s. 8 



ii 4 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 

desire, they persist with great confidence. But there 
come times when life on such terms cannot be made 
to signify anything; and if our code is wrong, that 
is a gain. To be forced to admit that our interpreta- 
tion is utter confusion is the first necessity. Where- 
fore, a mood of dark distress may be far nearer a 
Christian hope than cheerful, well-fed, unthinking 
satisfaction with our lot. Hence the gain of days like 
our own when every doctrine of Providence which 
is based on ideas of ease and happiness or any kind 
of beneficence has come to grief amid a horror of 
thick darkness. 

Nevertheless many persist with the old code, 
little modified; and our worst danger is that we 
should start afresh with merely a slight revision. 
Such for example is the idea of a finite God doing 
His best to interline with good this general devil's 
manuscript of blind mechanical indifference, for it 
still works with our ordinary notion of good, and does 
not go on to ask the vital question which concerns 
the good God purposes to achieve. 

Reconciliation to God is just agreement with His 
mind about this good. What it is appears in Jesus 
Christ. He is the Second Adam — all God intends 
man to be. So supremely is this God's mind that 
He is the fullness of God: and so completely does 
it sum up the purpose of all God's doings that in 
Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and know- 
ledge. This amazingly exalted language rests on 
the experience of finding in Christ a consistent, 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 115 



certain, complete and blessed meaning for all ex- 
perience, through the kind of good God intends it all 
to serve, and in view of which none of it is imperfect 
or superfluous. 

This power to reconcile us to God in all His 
way with us is summed up in the Cross, wherein 
every form of evil is made to work for good. Even 
death, with every conceivable accompaniment of 
shame and agony and visible defeat, is turned into 
the doing of God's will and the revelation of His 
pardoning love and the manifestation and victory 
of His righteousness and peace. Having found 
there the good which alone is of incomparable value, 
we learn also that the worst as well as the best 
must serve it. 

This does not mean that there are no evils to 
be shunned. What we may shun is not appointed. 
Still less does it mean that there is nothing to be 
altered and nothing to be opposed. What in that 
case is appointed is the duty of altering or opposing. 
Nor does it deny that we live under a system which 
works out general consequences affecting equally 
saint and sinner. But it affirms that, behind the 
inevitable and the natural, there is a power wholly 
different from brute force and relentless law and 
blind working. The world is still an order, but it 
is the order of God's household. Its very quality 
is that it is determined by the needs of His children. 
Yet it is no less an order, because their first need 
is to find their profit in the general good and not 

8—2 



n 6 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



to wish to be distinguished in outward favours 
from their brethren. The very heart of the discovery 
is the spirit which forgives and bears and forbears, 
and which no longer judges life by the narrow mind 
which would apportion rewards by our measure of 
merit. Its good is not of that material kind, nor is 
it apportioned in that hard legal way, but is, through 
Christ, a total change of all our views of good and 
of all our ways of seeking it and of all our relations 
to one another in the enjoyment of it. In one sense 
it is altogether above and beyond the world and all 
its glory, being a glory of God, not only for our 
own souls, but for the perfect household of God 
wherein they are blessed. Yet it is in no sense 
apart from the world and its right uses, just as the 
harvest is above and beyond the seed-time, yet is 
in no sense separate or apart, but is the sole meaning 
and value of all its labours. 

2. It is the most unlikely affirmation, about 
the most unlikely persons 

'To them who are the called according to his purpose.' 

If it takes a heroic effort of faith to believe that all 
things work together for any one, how much more 
difficult is it to believe that they so work for those 
who are devoted to the highest. Surely the nobler 
and greater and more spiritual the purpose, the worse 
do things serve those who pursue it. Socrates was 
rewarded with a cup of poison, Dante with exile, 
the inventor of printing with being thought in 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 117 



league with the devil, the founder of modern 
science with imprisonment as a heretic, and many- 
pioneers of freedom with the scaffold or the stake. 
Many have had the same experience as Paul him- 
self. For what he wrought with his hands some kind 
of meagre living-wage was accorded him, but for 
what he wrought with his mind and heart he had 
only vituperation and stoning and imprisonment 
and finally martyrdom. Above all, how did things 
work for Him whom, on Paul's view, it ought to 
have served best of all ? He had nowhere to lay His 
head and was despised and rejected. His final 
payment was the Cross — a shameful, agonising, 
appalling execution as a criminal. Yet, in face of 
all this obvious loss of worldly advantage, the 
Apostle maintains that the world belongs to those 
who have a definite sense of a call to a divinely 
appointed task, that all of it works for them, and 
none of it belongs to any one else or works to any 
one else's profit, and that, finally, it never served 
any one absolutely except Him in whom God's 
purpose was perfectly realised, the person whom 
of all men it seemed to serve worst. 

A call according to God's purpose is not an ex- 
clusively Christian experience. Every prophet had 
it, and no greater accounts of it exist than those 
given by Isaiah and Jeremiah. It is not even limited 
to the Bible. Where any one is brought to realise 
that his own purpose in life is nothing, and is led, 
regardless of loss or trouble or human disapproval, 



n8 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



to follow a higher, we may not deny that there is a 
call of God. 

But the Apostle's call was through Jesus Christ: 
and it was the same with those to whom he spoke. 
As an experience, it was not different from a 
prophetic call, or any summons which made one's 
own purposes subordinate to God's. But Jesus 
meant both a new sense of God's purpose for all 
and a new relation to it of all our ordinary human 
ways. Before Him, God's call had been limited to 
a few great and specially endowed souls, and only 
for unusual and conspicuous tasks, mostly at some 
great crisis in human affairs. But in Christ the call 
came to all kinds of humble Christian folk to serve 
God's high purpose in all kinds of common ways. 

Yet Christ's call is thus for all and embraces all 
things, not because it is lower, but because it is 
higher than any other. No purpose could be higher 
than to be God's son in whom He is well pleased, 
nor any life greater than that which manifests the 
Father. But a light set in the heavens is not thereby 
set apart from us. On the contrary it is thereby 
made available for all. It is not like a lighthouse 
by which you can only steer great ships, but like 
the pole-star by which the wayfarer in the valley 
and the shepherd on the hill can guide their steps. 
Select souls for special achievement we may not 
be able to be, but the higher purpose of being sons 
of God we all can have. Then every experience 
which concerns this high relationship is forthwith 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 119 



exalted. Where in these common tasks we forget our- 
selves to seek first God's Kingdom and His righteous- 
ness, there is supremely the Divine service. 

What the Apostle says he knows is that those who 
are thus called are the people, the only people, who 
possess the world, and find all things in it work 
for good. The very secret of all profitable use of 
life is just to abandon the expectation that it ever 
was designed to forward persons devoted to material 
and merely worldly purposes, with no higher ends 
than gain or pleasure or pride of place, and to dis- 
cern that naturally the only ends it could have been 
designed to serve are God's. 

On a superficial and immediate judgment this is 
obviously quite untrue. The higher your aim, the 
more difficult it is to get life to work for it, and 
the more all the powers of the world and of society 
are massed against it. To be called, with the un- 
wavering devotion which alone is God's call, to serve 
truth and beauty and holiness, which alone is God's 
purpose, will make you more likely to be poor than 
rich, to be hated than approved, to be despised than 
praised. The more utterly your call is as your 
Master's, the more your destiny is likely to be as His : 
nor has He ever asked you to follow Him on other 
terms. 

But only the very thoughtless can take life at 
its face value. Reflection challenges all our hasty 
judgments, and more particularly about those who 
make the most of life. Are they so certainly those 



i2o THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



who are most efficient for their own purposes of 
winning the world's material rewards? Their 
ambitions may be tangible, but do they prove 
satisfying? Do they fill the heart's deepest needs? 
In the end for what do all things work together 
except to reduce such achievements and every 
hope and trust built on them to dust? And, on 
the contrary, do those who are called according 
to God's purpose so certainly draw blanks in life's 
lottery? Is aspiration, or hope, or inward peace, 
or the sense of God's approval, or any spiritual 
issue no compensation for loss and pain and long 
delay? Many people are always confident of being 
right when they are arguing on mean and material 
grounds. But are they? Whence comes this uni- 
versal sense among all prophetic souls that the God, 
according to whose purpose they are called, possesses 
the earth and its fullness? What makes them 
speak in such exalted terms of the ease of His 
power, as, for example, taking up the isles as a 
very little thing? Why did the Greatest, whom 
outwardly life served worst, think that in His hard 
life and shameful, terrible death, He manifested a 
Father who numbers our hairs, frees us from care 
and enables us to set all fears at defiance? How 
could those who followed Him find that from God 
are all things and unto Him are all things, that 
they may be ours, without limit and without 
exception ? 

Practical issues are never tested by argument, 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 121 



and if this is a true experience, must we not revise 
our notions of those who really possess the world 
and find all things theirs? 

3. It is the most unlikely affirmation about 
the most unlikely persons, and for the 
most unlikely reason 

'To them that love God.' 

If we follow our outward and obvious judgment 
of life, we could hardly conceive anything more 
incredible, more utterly paradoxical. Is it not certain 
that the people who win the world's possessions 
and the world's ease and the world's honours, for 
whose good all things appear to work, are those 
who look well after their own interests, and con- 
centrate their powers on getting on, undistracted 
by a conscience very sensitive towards God or very 
considerate towards man? Love to God, with its 
troublesome scrupulousness and absorption in self- 
forgetting interests, and its distracting sympathy 
with those who are ridden down in competition, and 
its calls to linger behind to help those who have 
fallen by the way, is surely life's heaviest handicap. 
In our day there are many who openly declare that 
it is a condition to be observed only at the cost of 
prompt and utter insolvency. 

Yet here is Paul maintaining that to love God is 
the only condition on which we ever can be solvent 
on any permanent or essential issue: and he certainly 
did not seem to come short in realising the extent 



122 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 



of the demands it makes, whether of sensitiveness 
towards God or of considerateness for His children. 
Moreover, he seems to have staked confidently his 
own life upon the issue in the most impressive 
and heroic way, in such a way at least as gives him 
a right to summon us to reflection. 

But the moment you reflect, you must, on the 
most external judgment, have some doubts of the 
real value of selfish success. How often is what is 
selfishly earned hurtfully spent, what is selfishly 
hoarded a burden of anxiety and an enslaving to 
greed, what is selfishly enjoyed mere food for ever 
more insatiate desire! Finally, all gain of this kind 
may at any time leave its possessor; and it is certain 
that he must leave it. 

But, still further, it does not require very profound 
reflection to see that no merely external judgment 
can measure life's most valuable blessings. On no 
other matter is the danger of indulging in platitude 
quite so great, yet it is not a platitude that the soul 
lives by vision of the truth and is enriched by the 
gentle and gracious and beautiful things of character 
and has its only true social success in the fellowship 
of the wise and the good. 

At times when you are sensitive and sore, you 
have no doubt been tempted to think that nothing 
equips for the battle like hardness of heart. Yet it 
is not the rigid bough which weathers the storm, 
nor the granite cliff which encroaches upon the 
sea, nor the heart hardened to bone which stands 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 123 



the strain of living. On deeper reflection must you 
not find the mood in which you envy the hard 
hearted to be hasty and shallow? On the contrary, 
do not they miss all that is best? Is it not just the 
love which ever draws the heart upwards and keeps 
it tender and sensitive and responsive to all around 
it, the love to God which loves all He seeks and all 
for whom He seeks it, that is the one supreme 
condition for getting out of life its highest good 
and finding the true meaning of all experience? 
And surely love alone can face all experience, making 
no selection from it of what is easy and pleasant 
and profitable, but finding also pain and conflict 
and opprobrium and death itself turned by its own 
alchemy to serve its own uses. 

This the Apostle says we know. Knowledge 
seems a strong expression for our faltering, dubious, 
broken trust that somehow the highest is the surest. 
But he too admits that it is fragmentary, like 
a blurred image in a mirror of rusty steel. And 
he must more frequently speak of it as faith, a 
mount of vision up which knowledge climbs with 
trembling steps. Yet, then, he says still more 
boldly, We see. Faith is never to him a mere exalted 
state of feeling, a mere emotional persuasion, but 
is always insight into the world as God has actually 
made it and the real purpose for which He uses it. 

Faith works, Paul says, by love. But this does 
not mean love as an emotion. It means that love 
is life's deepest reality. Very imperfectly we may 



i2 4 THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 

know it, but it wholly knows us and succours us 
in all our ways. And the simple issue is that, when 
we know the great purpose love has called us to, 
and, through Jesus Christ, accept it as our own, 
and are at one with God in seeking to realise it, 
we know also that no trial or difficulty or distress 
or aught' the world can bring against us can ever 
shake our confidence that love directs our whole 
life toward that high end and can justify all it ever 
required us either to suffer or to do. 

This knowledge concerns, not our emotions, but 
God's rule. Either God so directs the world that 
it serves only material ends, and then the way to 
use it is efficient direction of our energies to self- 
interest; or He has made it to serve spiritual ends, 
and then the way to use it is by utter devotion to 
His purpose, in a love to Him which meets all trials 
with patience and does all duty with humility, and 
which issues in reverence and consideration and 
loyalty for all His children. If one is right, the 
other is wrong; .and there is no middle way. 

But remember you must choose by what you 
know to be, true and not merely by what you feel 
to be edifying. It concerns the real nature of things, 
the real way it works, the real good it is designed 
to serve. Either the strong things in the world are 
those of self-regard, or they are those of self-for- 
getting love. 

Here is the test of what you mean by faith in 
Christ. What do you mean by it ? Has it a meaning ? 



THE PARADOX OF THE WORLD 125 



Look upon Him and ask yourselves what you mean 
by believing in such a person. Then you will dis- 
cover, not only that it has a meaning, but that, if it 
is not the meaning of all things, you do not believe 
at all. Is Jesus right in imagining that He reveals 
the Father, that in Him we really see what God is 
about, both what kind of good He means to achieve 
and how He purposes to achieve it? 

If Jesus was right, then quite clearly the bulk of 
our ambitions are wrong and most of our methods 
of seeking them futile. We have had much rhetoric 
and many schemes for making the world work 
better for good. But have we asked ourselves the 
necessary previous questions — the kind of good 
they will work for, the kind of people for whom 
they will work, the condition on which their working 
is effective? It is vain to plan your journey till 
you have decided on your goal. Is it possible, in 
spite of all that appears to the contrary, that this 
way of God's call to serve His purpose in Christ 
Jesus, in love to Him which is love to men, is the 
only way in which the world ever will work together 
for profit, and that the only secure achievement in 
life is the highest? 



X 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 

2 Corinthians v. 19. 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.' 

To be simple is thought to be easy, and to under- 
stand simplicity easier still. But few judgments are 
more superficial. To rid himself of artificiality and 
complexity is among man's last and highest achieve- 
ments. 

A French philosopher speaks of life as working 
simply like an artist drawing a picture with one 
stroke of his pencil, while our mechanical under- 
standing of it is like a child imitating his line with 
a multitude of little squares. The skill to make that 
one adequate stroke, or even the sense for its simple 
perfection, is in every sphere high and difficult, but 
in no sphere more than religion. Nor anywhere else 
does failure impose as burdensome complexity. 

Some learned persons even think that religion 
began with simplicity, and that, if only we could 
work back to primitive religion, we should recover 
religion's simple essence. But such traces as we can 
discover tend to show that the primitive, so far from 
being simple, was an amazing confusion of compli- 
cated beliefs and detailed observances. The great 
prophetic minds alone have achieved simplicity, and 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 127 



no one has perfectly attained it except the Greatest. 
He reduces it to good-news of the Father to His 
children. Nothing could be simpler, yet, for our 
complex minds, few things are more difficult. 

The Apostle's statement in our text is his own 
understanding of this good-news of Jesus; and it, 
too, is simple when we rid ourselves of the elabora- 
tions which have been woven into it till it has 
ceased to be a gospel and become a system of 
theology, a code of divine legislation. To rediscover 
its simplicity, we must banish from our minds every 
thought about it except that it is just good-news of 
God and nothing else. For Paul a ministry of 
reconciliation was the sun-kissed slopes of Olivet, 
near and friendly in the pure air ; for his interpreters 
it has too often been the precipices of Sinai, wrapped 
in a thick cloud of dogma which echoes with the 
heavy rumbling of controversy. The words which 
to the Apostle were plain every-day speech have 
become remote and elaborate and technical. 'God 
was in Christ ' to him meant simply the felt presence 
of the Father in One who was perfectly His Son; 
to his interpreters it is a complex and mysterious 
doctrine of Christ's person. 'Reconciling the world,' 
which was simply turning men from enemies into 
friends, is expounded by perplexing controversies 
about prevenient grace. 'Not imputing trespasses,' 
which was simply the pardon which restores to 
fellowship in spite of offences, is turned into difficult 
and forbidding theories of justification. The result 



128 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 



has been to change the simple gospel that God is 
a Father just because there is no limit to His love's 
endeavour to restore us to our place as His children, 
into a plan of salvation, which stands like a frowning 
precipice between us and God. 

This gospel of the Father is what the Apostle 
says was before the law and in respect of which the 
law is only a tutor to prepare us for its liberty. 

The law, strange to say, always does follow the 
gospel which is meant to replace it. Nothing in 
human history is more certain, or more unexpected, 
or, at first sight, more inexplicable. 

In an actual literal sense Paul himself may not 
have realised, the Priestly Law he specially intended 
is shown by historical study to have followed the 
Prophetic Gospel. 

Like the Apostle the prophets too felt themselves 
ambassadors on behalf of God to beseech men to be 
reconciled to Him. God rose up early to send them. 
Nine times over Jeremiah repeats the figure of God 
getting up at dawn to toil till dark, like a day- 
labourer, at this work of winning His erring children. 
And He does it for a people who have turned to Him 
their backs and not their faces. In essence that is 
the same as Paul's gospel that Christ died while we 
were yet sinners to commend to us God's love, or 
our Lord's still simpler presentation of God as a 
Father who sees his erring son a long way ofT and 
runs and falls on his neck and kisses him, and, 
without a single question about the past, overwhelms 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 129 



him with every token of forgiveness. Every prophet 
has that same message. Thus Isaiah says, God 
'spreads out His hands all the day to a rebellious 
people who walk in a way that is not good, after 
their own thoughts, and provoke Him to His face 
continually.' Moreover all the prophets were assured 
that everything God did in the world confirmed their 
message, or, as Paul sums it up, 'all things are of 
God who reconciled us to Himself through Jesus 
Christ/ 

God's message is the same at all times and in 
all things, and is not different, but only plainer 
and fuller and better authenticated in Jesus Christ. 
He is no mere incident contrary to the burden of 
the rest of creation and revelation, but is the con- 
summation and supreme manifestation of all they 
mean. 

This gospel simplifies religion to faith in the 
Father and the service of love to His children. 
God, for the prophets, was not housed in temples 
or fed by sacrifices or honoured by solemnities, 
but 'looked to him who is poor and of a contrite 
spirit and who trembles at His word' — a word 
concerned only with doing justly and loving mercy 
and walking humbly with our God. But, as never in 
the world before or since, the Gospel was simplified 
by Jesus. God is the Father whose highest perfec- 
tion appears in kindness to the unthankful and evil : 
and, because He is love, we can serve Him only 
through His children and especially by His own 



o. s. 



9 



130 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 



perfection of loving those who hate us. As He left 
no one outside of God's care and no place without 
God's presence, there was neither Jew nor Greek nor 
particular seat of ritual worship. Worship of God 
who is Spirit required only spirit and truth. God's 
service was the common life: and traditions of the 
dead past were set aside as making void God's word 
in life, and purifications as the wrong way of cleans- 
ing life, and regulations as the wrong way of 
directing life. 

Both the prophets and Jesus foresaw that the 
imposing national religion of their time, with its 
complicated traditions, elaborate sacrifices and cere- 
monies and multiform regulations, would perish 
with the nation and the temple. And their predic- 
tions were literally fulfilled, with great gain for a 
religion of the heart and life. 

After the prophets, idolatries passed and God was 
worshipped as one Lord over all. After Jesus, faith 
was simply in His God and Father, worship a gather- 
ing of the two or three in an attic room, without ritual 
save a meal of fellowship, and without regulation 
beyond willingness to be first in service and last in 
honour. 

But now comes the strange part. In spite of the 
prophets, in a sense because of the prophets, our 
Lord inherited a religion of enormously complicated 
traditions of the fathers, ostentatious prayings, 
ritual sacrifices, elaborate purifications and other 
meticulously regulated sacred doings, with a dis- 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 131 



regard for humble, penitent faith and righteous 
dealing so great that it all seemed in His eyes 
one vast hypocrisy. Yet this structure, so alien to 
the intention of the prophets, rested on the prophets 
and, in particular, on the very conviction that God 
was in them after a manner special and pre-eminent. 
A nation, it was thought, endowed with such 
unique organs of revelation must be God's peculiar 
people, and the unique and sure message from God 
they had received through the prophets be elaborately 
enshrined in tradition, ritual and regulation. 

Stranger still, after Jesus, and because of Jesus, 
the Gospel was turned into a yet vaster and more 
complicated system of law. The Church replaced 
the nation with claims which made God even more 
exclusive; sacraments replaced sacrifices and were 
even more sacerdotal; a more mysterious traditional 
belief was imposed by a greater external authority; 
a more elaborate ritual was made valid by a more 
exacting priestly succession; regulation penetrated 
deeper into life by means of a vastly more intrusive 
system of confession and casuistry. 

And, what is more, the yoke was heavier just 
because of the deeper assurance that God was in 
Christ without limit or imperfection, that the Spirit 
was not given by measure unto Him, that in Him 
was fullness of grace and truth, that He was light 
and in Him was no darkness at all. A church 
possessing so absolute an organ of revelation seemed 
more than ever God's peculiar people, its tradition 

9—2 



132 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 



more necessary for enshrining His teaching, its 
rites for continuing His influence, its priestly cor- 
poration for regulating His service. 

As all this structure depended on how God was 
in Christ, there was added, as a new and more 
burdensome condition of salvation the acceptance, 
if not the understanding, of correct views of the 
precise manner of it. Correct views of His person 
came to appear God's first requirement, till whoso- 
ever would be saved must receive, as revealed 
mysteries guaranteed by the Church, all the meta- 
physical subtleties about His person enunciated in 
the Athanasian Creed. 

Why, you may well ask, did this happen ? If the 
Gospel is so simple, why was it so laboriously 
elaborated into law? What has this abstract omni- 
potence encased in human form to do with the 
actual Jesus who taught in parables and spoke of 
nature and human nature, who rejoiced in spirit 
and felt forsaken in anguish, who took infants in 
His arms and blessed them and passed scorching 
judgment upon teachers and rulers, who lived with 
our limitations and died facing death with our 
human darkness and anguish? In this Christ we 
truly feel the beat of the heart of God, but we 
can no more feel it in the Christ of the formulas 
than we can feel our own pulse in an artificial limb. 
And what has it to do with the gospel of reconcilia- 
tion ? A Father who never ceases to watch and work 
for His erring children cannot be also an offended 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 133 



Potentate who will only condone our offences upon 
strict conditions. 

The reason is just the reason of the artificial 
limb. When the simplicity of life from within fails 
us, we must do the best we can with the laboured 
complexity of mechanism from without. Religion 
has the same function for the soul as limbs for the 
body, for the soul is active and progressive only as 
it has something sacred to reverence and obey. 
Some form of faith, therefore, it must have: and, 
if it have not one which arises simply from our vision 
of the truth, the higher our need, the more elabora- 
tion will be necessary to supply a substitute from 
without. As the hand needs a more complex artifice 
than the foot, a higher gospel needs a more com- 
plex law to do its work. 

The difference between simplicity and elaboration 
is a question of order. If you begin with God, you 
quite simply have the Gospel, just as, if you begin 
with life, you quite simply have the use of your 
hand. 

We can compare it to rhetoric and eloquence. The 
order of eloquence is simple and natural; the order 
of rhetoric is laboured and artificial. Yet inward 
sincerity alone makes the simple and natural possible; 
and the hardest labour, without it, only increases 
the unnaturalness and complexity. Still more the 
simplicity of the Gospel is like true poetry. Poetry 
is a right ordering of words, and the right order 
is the simple order. Yet an inspired imagination 



134 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 

alone can achieve that simplicity. Effort, without it, 
merely achieves the elaborate dexterities of recondite 
rhymes, startling epigrams and fantasies tricked out 
in curious and antique words. 

The order of the simplicity of the Gospel is the 
order of our text. God is in Christ to reconcile 
the world to Himself. Whereupon pardon of sin 
follows and is one with it. So long as we keep to 
this order, the absolute presence of God in Christ 
appears in the impossibility of separating anything 
Jesus ever said or did from the task of manifesting 
God's mind to His children. His endurance of the 
contradiction of sinners against Himself, His bearing 
of the tribulations which cause us to think that 
God is against us, especially His Cross, which turns 
defeat and shame and agony and death into pardon 
and peace and victory over all mortal trials, commend 
God's love as above all love because it seeks us 
while we are yet sinners. 

But you may here ask, if the Gospel is thus 
simple, if it is in essence the Father seeking the 
return of His erring children, why is it not as easy 
as it is simple, easy to present and easy to understand ? 
Why should the life of His ambassadors be an un- 
broken record of bitter opposition and persecution 
and martyrdom? Why, in particular, should Jesus 
need to be a man of sorrows and commend God's 
love specially by a death of shame and agony ? And 
why, above all, when they have endured and all this 
testimony been borne, is the simple freedom of the 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 135 



Gospel turned into the complicated slavery of the 
Law? 

The gospel of reconciliation is simple as the 
prodigal coming to himself and going home and 
finding pardon showered upon him in every token 
of love. But it is not simpler. The prodigal must 
come to himself and go home every step of the 
way and find there the same Father and the same 
life he fled from, and discover in them freedom and 
peace and blessedness. However warm his welcome, 
this requires nothing less than that he who was dead 
should be alive again. It is simple as life, simple 
as love. There are no simpler things in the world, 
but so far are they from being easy that God alone 
can be their source: and even He can give them 
only as in spending His life He manifests His 
love. To be reconciled to God is to be reconciled 
to Him in His holiness and all it appoints for us 
and all it requires of us. God beseeches us to be 
reconciled to Him, but it is to Him as He is, for 
in nothing less can we be truly blessed. When God 
in Christ enables us to make this discovery and to 
go home to Him just as we are, with our sense of 
our own unworthiness as the measure of His love, 
we know that He has no thought in His heart about 
our trespasses except sorrow for our loss and the 
offer of all His help to live down their consequences 
and turn their evil into good. 

But this is not concerned with mere emotional 
regrets on our part and condonation of our offences 



136 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 



upon conditions on God's part. It has to do with 
acceptance of God's purpose in our lives as He ap- 
points them. Therefore, He can appeal to us only 
through those who have accepted it amid life's hardest 
trials and conflicts; and His only perfect appeal is 
through Him who bore all our griefs and carried all 
our sorrows and turned shame and agony and death 
into victory and pardon and the love from which 
nothing can separate us. 

But when we fail to follow the way of love which 
begins with God seeking to reconcile us to Himself, 
we must try the way of law which begins with our 
trespasses, as though the prodigal had not first said, 
I will arise and go to my father, willing to be with 
him even as a hired servant, but had proceeded to 
inquire on what terms the past would be overlooked 
or condoned. 

It is only a question of order, but it is like the 
order of our work and our wage. Our work put 
first, the earning of our wage is one with the doing 
of it; our wage put first, our work is a distinct and 
painful condition unfortunately attached to it. The 
right order is simple, but cannot be followed with 
less than the spirit of duty. So the right order of 
reconciliation we can follow only by the faith which 
works by love. 

Failing this, we must take the legal order and 
start with the conditions upon which God is willing 
to be reconciled. Forthwith God is no more for 
us in Christ as the simple persuasive incarnation of 



THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 137 



His love to the unthankful and evil, which makes 
all things work together to reconcile them to His 
mind and purpose. On the contrary, Christ's work 
must be explained in some way as the condition 
upon which God pardons. It is a condition to satisfy 
God's righteousness, and no longer an appeal which 
has no condition except returning to a righteous 
God. It is to satisfy a just Ruler and permit Him 
to condone our offences, whereas the only con- 
sequence of sin Jesus ever greatly concerned 
Himself with was its power to alienate us from our 
Father, and the only pardon which ever satisfied 
Him was restoration to God's friendship and peace. 
To desire any other pardon only shows that we 
are still following our way of blessedness, and not 
Christ's. We are seeking happiness by freedom from 
evil, whereas true reconciliation to God is a recogni- 
tion that no evil is to be shunned which brings us 
to Him and no pleasure or possession reckoned 
good which keeps us from Him. The riotous 
abundance which detains us in the far country is 
loss, and the swine-keeping and the husks are gain 
which bring us home. 

Failing this change in our thought of blessedness, 
we must betake ourselves to moral subtleties about 
imputation, puzzling doctrines about justification, 
burdensome sacerdotal appliances to communicate 
grace, and cramping, regulated obediences to fulfil 
God's requirements. Christ's yoke is no more easy 
and His burden no more light, but He becomes a 



138 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPEL 

further load of traditional dogma upon our faith and 
of ecclesiastical authority upon our lives. 

Only when we discover that our blessedness is in 
God as He is and as He deals with us, can we find 
Christ simply the heart of the Father commending 
His love to us, overwhelming us with every token 
of forgiveness and every proof of complete restora- 
tion to our place as His children. 

Yet simple as it is, it is not easy, else there had 
been no Cross. Its demands are not small. The 
heaviest requirements of law are finite; every 
requirement of love is infinite and leaves us, after 
we have done our utmost, still unprofitable. But 
it makes no demand without its own succour. 
Nor does it ask obedience except in its own freedom. 
If the yoke is not easy and light, as lightness and 
ease are reckoned in the far country, it is so by the 
strength and joy which come from knowing that 
all things are of God who reconciles us to Himself 
through Jesus Christ, with whom we are heirs of 
God who makes all things ours both for the highest 
uses of time and the surest hopes of eternity, and 
whose blessing makes rich and adds no sorrow. 



XI 



GOD'S FAILURES 

Luke xvii. 17-18. 'And Jesus answering said, "Were not the ten 
cleansed ? but where are the nine ? Were there none found that 
returned to give glory to God, save this stranger? 

The strangest feature of this incident is our Lord's 
unprotesting acceptance of the situation. One alone 
returns, while nine go their ungrateful way : and He 
leaves it there. He works no miracle on their diseased 
souls, such as He had done on their diseased bodies; 
and He does not even remonstrate or appeal, though 
by either way He could have produced at least cor- 
rectness of behaviour. 

And, as Jesus did, God manifestly does every 
day. He sets right no visible defection by outward 
correction, and works no change of heart or direction 
of will by miraculous power. Day by day He makes 
His appeal of goodness; and when that fails, He 
accepts failure. This is the problem we have to 
consider. 

1. God fails with signal mercies chiefly because 
He fails with the common experiences 

Even as an isolated lapse of an otherwise grateful 
humanity, this incident would be a painful revela- 
tion of the possibilities of human nature; and only 



i 4 o GOD'S FAILURES 



a cynic, you might imagine, would regard the action 
of these nine Jews as typical of mankind. Yet this 
ingratitude was no unique experience for Jesus, and 
He does not seem to have thought it exceptional in 
God's experience of His children. 

Personal application to ourselves we should all 
resent. We may have been blind to many blessings 
when they were veiled by familiarity or by slow 
realisation, but is it conceivable that a deliverance, 
impressive by its greatness, its suddenness, its 
transforming effect, should not stir our hearts to 
their depths ? Think of the pit of misery from which 
these lepers had been drawn. Think of days of 
hideous suspense slowly changing to ghastly certainty, 
of the bright canopy of heaven turned into the 
black shroud of dead hopes, of acquaintances 
passing with averted faces, of intimate friends 
arresting themselves with a shudder, of homes 
shadowed at once by horror at their presence and 
fear of a separation more awful than the grave. 
Then realise the desolate waste, the bare shelter, 
the fellowship only of companions in misery. Broken, 
suffering, loathsome, they had cried for help, like 
Jonah, 'out of the belly of hell/ When this appalling 
misery passed suddenly, like an awful nightmare 
with the dawn, surely, like Jonah also, they would 
sacrifice unto God with the voice of thanksgiving 
and pay what they had vowed, knowing that their 
salvation was of the Lord. 

But while you may reasonably be confident of 



GOD'S FAILURES 141 

showing better manners, can you be equally sure 
of feeling deeper gratitude? Before you can be 
quite sure that in your inmost heart it would be 
otherwise with you, try to imagine the actual 
thoughts of these Jews. As disfigurement fell from 
their faces, and renewed vigour surged through 
their veins, and hope soared aloft from its grave, 
they saw themselves once again amid all the interests, 
activities and ambitions of their old lives. But, at 
the thought of home, consider how it would flash 
upon them that their old life might not be waiting. 
Were they not dead men out of mind, their ac- 
quaintances forgetful, their friends consoled, their 
offices assigned to others, their heirs secure in their 
possessions ? Then the pit from which they had been 
drawn seemed ready to swallow them back into dark- 
ness and oblivion. At the thought everything would 
be blotted from their minds except the need of haste 
to claim their place in the land of the living before 
time had wholly filled it with the interests of others. 

If self-regard rightly hold the place they gave 
it, they had reason for attending to business first 
and gratitude afterwards. Are you sure that it is 
the place you think wrong? Yet this it was that 
proved their action no mere lapse of a moment, but 
the outcome of lives habitually self-centred. They 
failed to observe the comet because they had ceased 
to regard the stars, though the stars, more than the 
comet, should be the spring of unutterable thoughts. 

The offence is thereby made greater, but is it not 



i 4 2 GOD'S FAILURES 



also brought closer to each of us? A failure which 
springs from blindness to life's constant possibilities, 
can be escaped only by those for whom life is no 
routine pursuit of self-regarding ends. 

Nor need we suppose a very poor type of self- 
regard, or thoughts mean and wholly material. 
Self-regarding possession is not necessarily selfish 
possession. With restoration to life and hope the 
love of wife and child would surge up in their 
hearts anew, and an immense desire would flame 
before each one to witness the joy in his home as 
he came back to it from his 'charnel cave.' And, 
around their own households, they would see the 
homesteads of their neighbours and the cheerful, 
bustling, friendly world in which they might once 
again play their part. 

To the kindly self many good and beautiful things 
belong. It is a pleasant thing to behold the sun 
and the love in human eyes which shines in its light, 
and there are things which spring under its warmth, 
which are blessed to give as well as to receive. Yet 
it may still be merely a roundabout way of going 
inward from the gift to the receiver and not a direct 
way of going outward to the Giver, thus making 
God's own goodness the supreme reason for forget- 
ting Him. 

Nor will it be otherwise in great deliverances, 
unless there is habitual returning to give glory to 
God for the common mercies, not as a mere matter 
of custom or form, but as the impulse of heartfelt 



GOB'S FAILURES 143 



gratitude. What are the usual thoughts of men who 
have been raised from mortal sickness, or have es- 
caped destruction by a hair's breadth? How often 
are their real thanks to their constitutions, or their 
fortunes or their skill, and their immediate thoughts 
concerned with recovering their place in the world 
they had seemed so near to losing ! 

Considering how constantly you take your privi- 
leges to be merely your due, can you be sure that 
any deliverance would seem to you more than the 
mere restoration of what is yours in your own 
right? Is not health better than recovery, and the 
unbroken enjoyment of life's blessings better than 
their restoration? Think of the abiding wonder of 
earth and air, and 'the human face divine,' and 
home and kindred, and the joy of living and thought 
and aspiration, and of the greatest marvel of all, 
that for us they are common and continuous. If, for 
this, you have never returned to give glory to God, 
is it not a fond illusion to suppose that any de- 
liverance in the world would be signal enough to stir 
your gratitude, or any experience poignant enough 
to 'stab your spirits broad awake'? 

God's first failure was not with His chastening, 
but with the blessings it had withdrawn. Feeding 
swine and eating husks, by which the prodigal 
came to himself, was a pastime compared with the 
experience of these Jews, yet they came to themselves 
only in the self-centred sense which leads to no 
Father. Their haste to turn their backs on their 



i 4 4 GOD'S FAILURES 



misery shows with what thoughts they had endured 
it. Were they not good citizens, honest in business, 
kindly at home, regular at worship, generous to 
good objects, blameless before men and- deserving 
well of God? How unjust that this fell disease 
should shut them up in a more terrible imprisonment 
than could be inflicted on the worst criminal ! Their 
hearts were broken, but not humbled; their eyes 
were blinded by tears of resentment, but not purged 
by dews of sorrow; they had been scourged, but, 
in no sense, chastened. 

Having got nothing save bitterness out of trial, 
they got nothing save self-satisfaction out of deliver- 
ance. It was God, not they, who had seen the error 
of His ways; and they were merely at length 
restored to their due. 

Only as we are exercised by affliction, and not 
as we resent it, can deliverance work gratitude. 
Otherwise, we know neither how to sorrow nor 
how to rejoice. Our feeling is like the leprous 
skin, which does not rightly respond to any influence 
from without, but ever returns in upon itself, to 
shut us up more closely in our self-regard. The 
heart either goes out to God by our experience and 
is blessed by all of it in God's varied world, by the 
cold of winter as well as the warmth of summer, 
by battling with the storm as well as by basking 
in the sunshine, or it returns upon itself and pines 
in the darkened prison-house of its own soul: and 
God can provide neither discipline nor deliverance 



GOB'S FAILURES 145 



which would call us forth to freedom under His open 
heavens. 

If what you do in small things is the index of 
what you would do in great, might not you too 
emerge out of torture and despair only to think of 
yourselves as deprived of your rights, and to take 
your return to your former state as merely tardy 
justice to your merits? And, as many a sorrowful 
example teaches us, God accepts this verdict of the 
heart of man, and apparently leaves the matter as it 
decides. 

2. God fails with life because He fails with 
the common religion 

All the nine who went away were Jews; the only 
one who returned was a Samaritan. 

The position of the Jew in religion was truly 
privileged. Though Paul was the Apostle of the 
Gentiles, he thought that the Jews had the advantage 
every way, and more especially because to them 
were committed the oracles of God; and our Lord, 
even while maintaining that God is a spirit to be 
worshipped by' all alike in spirit and in truth, 
regarded salvation as of the Jews. 

How great the advantage was appears when we 
remember that the Scripture of the Samaritans was 
confined to the Pentateuch, the most ceremonial 
and least spiritual part of the Old Testament, and 
that even this very restricted portion of Holy Writ 
had been received by them more in superstition 
o. s. 10 



146 GOD'S FAILURES 



than in piety. Had this Samaritan's religion con- 
sisted in mere formal obedience and respect for 
ritual observance to secure temporal prosperity, we 
need not have thought it strange, seeing how he 
did not know the prophets and psalmists, who 
taught that God would have mercy and not sacrifice, 
and that God's thoughts for His children were as 
high above their thoughts for themselves as the 
heavens are above the earth, and that the servant 
of the Lord has to win his victories by being a man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Or, if he 
knew anything of such teaching, it could only have 
been through his Jewish associates. There is such a 
thing as preaching successfully to others and being 
ourselves cast-away. The sun's rays which warm the 
earth travel through cold spaces, the stream which 
fertilises the plain springs from the barren rock, and 
the truth which makes alive may pass through dead 
souls. 

What sent these Jews off so hastily was the com- 
mand to show themselves to the priest. No small 
part of their eagerness was the desire to return to 
their religious privileges. They were, after the same 
fashion as the Athenians, very religious. Of nothing 
in their old life were they prouder than their religious 
doings; and we can imagine them often beguiling 
the weary hours by speaking of them, as the Sa- 
maritan sat silently attentive. Nor need we suppose 
that, in their affliction, their religion had been no 
consolation. But it had not enabled them to under- 



GOD'S FAILURES 147 



stand how health could be loss without God and even 
leprosy gain with God. There is only one religious 
discovery of value. It is not that God is behind all 
events, for that may only make them more terrible 
and strange. It is that God is in all events, even 
when they are not of His causing but of our sins, and 
that, by His purpose and succour, they may all be 
turned to good. These Jews had great means in their 
common religion for making this discovery. Recall 
how, directly and indirectly, our Lord constantly 
used the Old Testament, and how, without it, even 
Peter and Paul could not have understood Him. 
A high revelation through those who have found 
God in their experiences is a supreme gain for 
finding Him in our own; and a mind full of ignorance 
and superstition is a great hindrance. But, when we 
turn religion from its true purpose, missing the spirit 
and venerating the letter, the highest religion may 
be the greatest obstacle. 

As soon as these Jews heard the injunction, 
'Go show yourselves to the priest,' all their pride 
of religious caste blazed up in them. They did 
exactly what Jesus told them to do. In spite of their 
hurry to go home, they would go round about by 
the road of ceremonial purification. They obeyed to 
the letter, but it was the letter which the prompting of 
true gratitude made the Samaritan disregard. Their 
hearts swelled with pride when reminded that they 
were Abraham's seed and might once more claim 
their heritage as members of God's peculiar people. 

10 — 2 



148 GOD'S FAILURES 



This blotted out for them all thought that they were 
His sinful children, to whom He had so recently 
shown signal mercy. 

In contrast, the Samaritan, ignoring the letter, 
found that a very imperfect religion opened the 
heavens and made his face radiant with joy and 
gratitude. It also brought him back to Jesus Him- 
self, to find in Him the full revelation of the Father 
which would turn for him henceforth all life's ex- 
periences into a manifestation of a love which would 
enable him in all things to give thanks. 

Yet, even with this supreme manifestation of 
Himself, God may fail. Jesus Himself can be turned 
from being a vision to our own insight, an inspira- 
tion to our own devotion, an appeal to our own 
hearts, a victory for our own lives, into the supreme 
sanction of formulas, the supreme enslavement to 
institutions, the supreme imposition of rules and 
ceremonies. Men still can say 'Lord, Lord* and 
do outwardly all kinds of things in His name, and 
only the more fail to reach the reality of all He 
means, using the formulas about His person and 
the forms of His service, not as the life and the 
truth which are the way to the Father, but as the 
observances and the traditions which make His 
word of none effect, till, above every other cause, 
they stand between the soul and the living God, and 
cloud the sense that all things are from Him and 
unto Him. 



GOB'S FAILURES 149 



3. God fails with religion because He fails 
with the common intercourse 

While the Jews obeyed the letter, the Samaritan 
disobeyed, being prompted of his own heart and 
led by the spirit which makes alive. 

As he turned, they could not fail to see him; 
and, as he shouted his praise, they could not fail 
to hear him. But by the name of stranger Jesus 
called him; and He did not use the word carelessly. 
From the moment they were healed, the one thought 
of his companions was how he might henceforth 
be to them an utter stranger, how most easily they 
could turn their backs on him for good. And that 
shows what thoughts had been associated with him 
all the time. Their adversity had compelled them 
to put up with this alien bed-fellow. Perhaps their 
very abruptness in cutting his acquaintance showed 
that he had won their regard and even some measure 
of affection, and that in his company they had 
almost ceased to be Jews and become men. But, how 
would it stand with them, they reflected, should 
their fellow-worshippers learn of this contamination ? 
Here was a providential way of escape, without harsh 
explanation or painful parting. The Samaritan had 
turned back, and the whole affair could be settled 
simply by hurrying on. 

Their very kindliness exposed them the more to the 
temptation. But it was a kindliness which returned 
to everything bitter, narrow, sectarian, formal. Peace 



i So GOD'S FAILURES 



and chanty and sincerity they left behind in leaving 
Jesus. And — what was worse — it would have been 
vain to stay, because they had also turned away from 
all the deep things of the heart of humanity to which 
Jesus appealed. 

In fleeing from this alien, they fled from their old 
life and all its lessons. The deepest lesson of what 
God meant for them, not as Jews but as men, they 
had perhaps dimly understood in his company. As 
they fled from him, all discovery of the deep things 
of the soul of man, and all possibility of ever discern- 
ing that it was good for them to have been afflicted, 
vanished. 

Suppose instead that he had become their first 
care, that no prejudice could have come between 
them any more and no change have divided their 
fellowship, and we cannot imagine them failing to 
see the Father in their Deliverer. But their haste 
to be rid of the Samaritan showed that he was 
associated in their minds only with sad and bitter 
thoughts, thoughts to be escaped, not cherished. He 
spoke to them of days when they were aggrieved 
but not penitent, of days when their outward con- 
fession of God did not ward from their hearts the 
bitterest rebellion against His appointment for their 
lives, of days to be forgotten and not valued. In 
the last resort, God failed with all He appointed 
both of distress and of deliverance, because He failed 
with the ministry of this Samaritan. 

Your Samaritan, too, is always the person from 



GOD'S FAILURES 



whom your instinct of superiority would make you 
flee; and your treatment of him, above all else, 
decides how God can reveal Himself to your soul 
as the living God, and what He can make out of 
you by means of your fellows. 

Christ's own supreme test is how you deal with 
one of the little ones. The little one is ignorant, 
but ever seeks light; lags behind, but never ceases 
to aspire; has many moral falls, but ever stumbles 
forward; gropes often in the dark, but ever seeks 
the light; is not a shining example, but is wholly 
sincere; often lacks wisdom, but the instinct of 
his affection is always right. As you treat him, you 
show whether God has been able to teach you that 
there is nothing here with any of us save God's 
erring child and His unwavering love. 

Yet, if God is not to fail with you, you must go 
still farther. Your Samaritan may be a child, 
hungry and neglected, till it has lost all the charm 
of childhood, or a foolish youth dangerously playing 
with temptation, till he exhausts your patience, or 
an inefficient person searching fruitlessly for a place 
in a crowded world, till by his vacillation he forfeits 
your esteem, or a man who has little courage because 
he has little character. He may even be one whom 
intemperance and lust have degraded and to whom 
thoughts of good come only as fitful gleams of light on 
a winter day. Yet by him, most of all, you may find 
the Father, and by the Father all the true uses of life. 

Books, even the Bible, and forms of worship, 



152 GOD'S FAILURES 

even the highest, and organised societies, even the 
purest, are not religion, but only aids to religion, 
aids, moreover, do not forget, which you can turn 
into hindrances. To receive the Lord, you must 
receive those He sends; to visit Him, you must 
visit His sick and captive disciples. Above all, to 
know freely His mind and what it reveals of the 
perfection of our Father in Heaven, you must deal 
as He does, not only with the imperfect, but with 
the unthankful and evil. 

In the company of your Samaritan you will learn 
the reason of God's failures, and know that it is 
of reverence for His children, and not of weakness. 
Whether you find sincerity and responsiveness and 
humility and aspiration and readiness to give the 
glory to God, or continuance in error and evil in a 
way to cause you to marvel at God's forbearance, 
you will be in the way of understanding the thoughts 
of God's heart towards the children He has made 
in His own image, and you will be enabled to find 
all life the appeal of His love. 

If love is, in this way, moral reverence for those 
God has made in His own image, a confident and 
dogmatic assurance of universal salvation ceases to 
be its undeniable outcome, and for all God's working 
of the willing and the doing in us, our salvation 
must be wrought out with fear and trembling. 

In one sense God leaves it there, in the sense that 
He cannot alter His ways of appeal. But He would 
not be a Father at all, if this meant that His purpose 



GOD'S FAILURES 153 



of good could end. Jesus constantly accepted the 
verdict of man's ingratitude, yet He never was in 
any way discouraged by it. He went on as before, 
revealing the Father, pleading by word and deed, 
giving Himself unreservedly for those who rejected 
Him, living for them, and, in the end, dying for 
them. 

That death, commending God's love to us while 
we were yet sinners, is the highest manifestation 
of the heart of God this world affords; and we may 
not rashly assume that there could be anything even 
in another life which could set it in a clearer light. 
No more in another life than in this can any display 
of power take its place to turn our hearts truly to 
God. The supremest privileges of another world, 
even as of this, might be used only to feed self- 
esteem, and so to shut us off from our brethren, 
and so from our Father. 

Yet we do not readily admit the limits of love's 
resources, even as we poor finite creatures may 
employ them. Did we say, as sometimes it has been 
said, that in the Cross of Christ God has done all 
He can do, and, love having justified itself, justice 
must take its course, should we be thinking ade- 
quately of the heart of God ? In which way would the 
Cross be the highest manifestation of the Father? 
Would it be as the last demonstration of mercy be- 
fore abandoning the sinner ? Or would it not rather 
be as the supreme assurance that His mercy never 
could be exhausted? If the Cross is love's highest 



154 GOD'S FAILURES 



evidence, how can it be love's outermost boundary? 
Is it not rather a declaration that love is without 
bounds ? 

A benefit unacknowledged is so often turned to 
bitterness that we can easily imagine the nine 
among those who shouted loudest 'Crucify Him! 
Crucify Him ! ' to the Master. But what if we were 
to think of them as among those who on the Day 
of Pentecost were pricked in their hearts, and who 
cried out to the disciples as they had never done 
to the Master, " Brethren what shall we do?" and 
all because the appeal, which, though it had made 
them bitter, they never could live down, was just 
the memory of their benefactor sorrowful but un- 
remonstrating ! And when shall we say that 
possibility is exhausted ? 

At all events this is the only kind of success 
with which God will be satisfied. On it He stakes 
everything, and, till He wins it, He is content to 
accept failure without any thought of replacing it 
by any form of compelling assent. 



XII 



THE PEACEMAKER AND THE 
PEACEABLE 

Matthew v. 9. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called 
sons of God.' 

On one occasion I was asked to preside at a meeting 
of prayer for all the churches. There was a printed 
programme of the things we were to pray for. The 
first sentence which caught my eye was: "That 
ministers should cease to preach upon problems. " 
That petition, I fancy, would find an echo in many 
hearts. 

If you have come to the house of God primarily 
to worship, the intrusion of problems, whether of 
thought or of action, will be apt to chill and 
repel. Why should they be intruded upon you? 
Should not the sanctuary be above all else a place 
of calm ? May we not say for a little to the struggle 
of life: Stay here outside, while I go yonder and 
worship? For one short hour may we not turn 
aside from the fevered hurry of life to stand in the 
changeless presence of God? If, at such a moment, 
anyone venture to speak to us, may we not ask 
that he dwell only on the pardon of sin, the grace 
which succours our weak will, the love which turns 



156 THE PEACEMAKER 



affliction to blessing, the might which makes all 
things work together for our good ? May we never 
leave outside the turmoil of the world, and, by 
looking for a little at the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ, endeavour to catch a glimpse of the 
city which has foundations, not in the problems of 
the present, but in the eternal verities? 

If, on such good grounds, the preacher can speak 
comfortably to Jerusalem and say unto her, Thy 
God reigneth, and give her the oil of joy for 
mourning, why, in the name of common sense as 
well as of religion, should he ever preach politically 
or socially? Why, when he can lay his hand in 
healing upon bruised and wearied souls, should he 
even preach morally ? Why is he not content simply 
to preach a gospel which lays us at rest in the 
great calm which is at the heart of life and which is 
God? 

All this seems utterly convincing: yet there is 
another way of looking at the matter which is also 
convincing. 

What is the religion worth which shuts itself in 
with thick walls and will not allow the light of 
heaven to enter except through stained-glass and 
which drowns the world's clamour and wail with 
the roll of organs? Who are you to be happy in 
the central calm like a pagan god, while without is 
injustice, naked force, cruel greed, rags, hunger, 
vice and crime ? Can true religion, and above all 
the religion of Jesus Christ, be heedless of any 



AND THE PEACEABLE 157 



task of public justice and righteousness, or of private 
compassion and fair dealing? 

How with the crying actualities of evil and pain 
at our doors, racking real flesh and blood, should a 
preacher waste his time at all on the generalities of 
pardon and grace and eternal life? Is he not plainly 
shirking the demands of Christ, refusing to follow 
those who in His name resisted unto blood striving 
against sin, and, while professing to reverence the 
word of the Cross, in reality making it of none 
effect ? 

Both views seem alike convincing, yet are they 
not in flat contradiction? Nor is it a mere matter 
of argument. Do they not represent moods which 
in most of us are in unceasing conflict? Is there 
any possible way except to live for the most part in 
face of the present distress and to turn from it 
occasionally to the eternal calm? 

But this is the very secret of the peacemaker 
that in him the eternal calm and the present distress 
are not alien and opposite and irreconcilable. Like 
God Himself all evil finds in him an implacable 
foe; and like God also the mightiest weapon of his 
warfare is a peace evil cannot assail. 

For this resemblance to God he is called a son 
of God. In these beatitudes each virtue has its own 
appropriate blessing. Those who hunger and thirst 
after righteousness are filled; those who mourn are 
comforted; the pure in heart see God. With like 
appropriateness the peacemakers are called sons of 



158 THE PEACEMAKER 



God. Doing God's work in God's way, they hear 
through all life's turmoil the Spirit of God crying 
in their hearts, 'Abba, Father,' so that they are as 
calm as they are intrepid, as full of life's realities in 
the sanctuary as of the spirit of adoration and worship 
in the day of battle. 

But it is the peacemaker who has this secret 
and is a son of God, not the peaceable. The peace- 
able is only a maker of ease, a very different matter 
from a maker of peace. A maker of ease God most 
certainly is not. In life, as it comes from Him, slack- 
ness means defeat, and defeat means death. He 
appoints suffering and He permits sin. The reasons 
may be mysterious, but about the practical issue 
there is no dubiety. It means that God will have 
His children 'mount and that hardly to eternal life,' 
coming home to Him with the crown of victory 
on their heads and the light of battle in their eyes. 
Our leader is the Captain of our Salvation whom the 
hypocrisies of this world mocked and scourged and 
crucified and laid in a tomb. The key to it all is the 
Cross, the cross of utter obedience, of absolute loyalty, 
of implacable conflict with evil, of final victory over 
sin. 

You can see who the peacemakers are by the 
account of what happens to them. They are perse- 
cuted for righteousness sake and are reviled and 
have all manner of evil said against them falsely. 
This happens to them precisely because they are 
not the peaceable, because they do not accept 



AND THE PEACEABLE 159 



things as they are, letting sleeping dogs lie, leaving 
well alone, and generally obeying the prudent maxims 
which ensure a quiet life. On the contrary, like all 
true guardians of the peace, they are resolute, 
uncompromising fighters against every disturbing, 
disruptive force. And that means they are foes of 
all evil, for all evil is disturbing and disruptive. 
You cannot, as the prophet said long ago, make 
an agreement with hell to be at peace with it: and 
without a clear mind on that point there is no being 
a peacemaker. 

The peaceable never admits that impossibility. 
Not discerning that the disruptive force in all sin 
is selfishness, of which love of ease is one of the 
worst manifestations, he sits down in the world, 
like a mother who hopes for quiet by trying to 
ignore the Babel of which her own slackness is the 
source. Like the ancient kings of Israel, he prays 
that the reckoning shall not be in his time, how- 
ever much his time may augment the score. He 
would run the risk of a malaria in the future, rather 
than disturb the cesspools in the present. 

But the true peacemaker is precisely the person 
who has no toleration for the world's cesspools, 
who knows that an undisturbed injustice, an un- 
disturbed wrong of any kind is the place where the 
pestilence necessarily breeds. Nor does he deal with 
it timidly or with feeble tools. He is no peace- 
maker who has no iron in his blood, no hot word of 
indignation at fitting times on his tongue, who is 



i6o THE PEACEMAKER 



not ready, when occasion calls, to be a follower of 
Him who could flash forth, 'Woe unto you Scribes 
and Pharisees, hypocrites, ' and who spoke with 
appalling concreteness of the wrong combination of 
work and worship — devouring widows' houses and 
making long prayers. 

The merely peaceable, on the other hand, has one 
supreme device for seeking peace. It is to put ex- 
pediency for principle. The adept at that exchange is 
frequently described as a safe man. Nor in any sphere 
is he thought safer than in the Church. History 
rather confirms the judgment that he is the most 
dangerous man in it, yet to this day men have not 
ceased to believe in him, with his average opinions, 
which are not opinions at all, his dull, formal decisions, 
which are not decisions at all, his course shaped 
only to float with the current, which is not a course 
at all. 

Nor is it only in the Church that such a man is 
dangerous. Under his shelter all abuses tend to 
gather, all the poisonous low vapours which only 
the lightning and the hurricane can purge away. 
The evil which corrupts the world is not fostered 
mainly by bad men, but by ease-loving men who 
will never take their stand upon principle and dare 
the consequences. Evil only prospers so abundantly 
because it can count so securely on such compliance 
and cowardice. 

A wholly perverted idea of Christian meekness 
takes it to be acceptance of things as they are as 



AND THE PEACEABLE 161 



the will of God. Serious men, who have no wish to 
travesty Christianity, believe that it is the Christian 
temper to sit down and fold our hands while disease 
festers in the dark, and injustice makes use of the 
civil powers, and wars are stirred up from oppression 
or greed of gold. They have even come to think that 
this is what Christ meant by being a peacemaker. 

But, if we have given cause for the misunder- 
standing, He never did. He who is supremely the 
Son of God was a peacemaker of a different order. 
In that sense of peace, He brought not peace but a 
sword. He troubled the State and rent the Church; 
He created a whirlwind of infinite desire and un- 
satisfied longing in the heart of man; before Him 
the measured pagan calm forsook man's brow. Those 
who went out in His name turned the world upside 
down: and no one has ever truly learned His spirit 
to this day who is not a disturber of conventions 
and formalities and agreements with hell to be at 
peace with it. 'My peace,' said the Master, 'I give 
unto you ' : yet it was certainly not as the world 
gives it, but with Gethsemane and Calvary in it, 
with sin crushed and love victorious, and God's will 
done on a hostile earth as in a favouring heaven. 
And His followers are those who resist unto blood 
striving against sin : and they and they alone are the 
true peacemakers. 

Yet, though every peacemaker is a fighter, every 
fighter is not a peacemaker. To be a peacemaker we 
must fight in peace as well as for it. 



o. s. 



ii 



1 62 THE PEACEMAKER 



There was a fisherman whose face used to haunt 
me when I was a boy. Afterwards I learned the 
secret of it. Even when you see peace, in most 
faces it only shimmers on the surface, like a sun- 
beam across rippling water, but on his face it was 
like the reflection of the azure heavens from placid 
ocean depths. Yet, it was said that absolute calm 
was only seen on it when the cloud-rack and the 
spin-drift began to meet. Nor did anyone doubt 
that the source of it was a more intense realisation 
at such a time of the God who holds the waters in 
the hollow of His hand. 

There was a strange, reverent sense, even among 
his not very religious fellow-craftsmen, that nothing 
else brought him through a storm which overtook 
him one day out on the Atlantic in an open boat, 
which was so sudden and violent that his companion 
was paralysed by fear, leaving as his only helper 
his son, a boy so young and inexperienced as scarce 
to know one rope from another. They felt that he 
had a power to think and act which no mere skill 
or courage could give, and that if, in spite of it, 
the worst had happened, it would still have enabled 
him to go down with his last thought, not of fear, 
but of saving others. 

Such is your true peacemaker, your really strong 
fighter amid the welter of human ill, your utterly 
reliable steersman in the storm of life. The state he 
guides from her council chamber to her humblest 
cottage is secure. Nor, in face of every uncertainty 



AND THE PEACEABLE 163 



and possibility, is there any equipment for the 
humblest responsibility except the calm which re- 
flects in placid faith the infinite heaven above. 

Yet it is not given to all, or to anyone at all 
times, to have a peace which works by knowledge 
and foresight and skill. In that boat there was also 
another kind of peace, without which it would 
never have reached harbour. While the other man 
was helpless, because he looked only on the tumult 
of the sea, the child was able to do what was needed, 
because he was conscious of little save his father's 
face, from which he read what was required of him 
and received the quietness and strength necessary 
for the doing of it. Why it was done he might not 
know; that it must be done he accepted from a wis- 
dom beyond his own. Thus he too was an efficient 
worker for deliverance, being also a peacemaker 
because he was himself at peace. 

Such childlike peace may seem weaker and less 
discerning, but what else is equal to all emergencies ? 
When troubles c roar like the roaring of the sea, and 
the light is darkened in the heavens, and counsel 
perishes from the wise/ the only wisdom available 
is to stand in our place and look up into the face 
of the Great Steersman of the world's barque, who 
alone knows its course and its port, and try to catch, 
through the mists and the darkness, His directions, 
and to carry them out, from moment to moment, 
in the task which lies nearest. 

And, if life is, as we have seen, more like a battle 

11— 2 



1 64 THE PEACEMAKER 



than a sea-faring, more of a fight for victory than 
a flight for safety, a battle, too, in the universal 
warfare between light and darkness, evil and good, 
the peace of the poor in spirit, who know that their 
only guidance is of God, is still more exclusively 
and continuously an abiding need when the battle 
is with confused noise of the warriors and the earth 
is filled with 'blood and fire and pillars of smoke/ 
Who can go forward resolute and secure, except as 
he realises that he is only a private in the great 
conflict the large issues of which he cannot know, 
appointed to his place by a General who will not for- 
get him even on the lonely outpost or the midnight 
skirmish, whose directions turn the immediate task 
into the service of an eternal purpose? 

Only when we thus fight with God to guide and 
sustain, can we fight in love, without which no 
fighting is peace-making. Love must often fight, 
and sometimes in anger, but it must never cease 
to be love. All its warfare is to save not to destroy, 
to pardon not to avenge, to establish mercy and 
not mere justice. Even indignation must not only 
be akin to pity, but be ever ready to change into 
it; and it must be purged of violence by knowing 
that 'the name of the wicked shall rot/ that sin, 
being folly and weakness, and not merely aggres- 
siveness and wrong, is to be pitied and not to be 
feared. Above the worst tumult it must hear a 
calm voice saying, 1 The Lord is in His holy temple, 
let all the earth keep silence before Him/ 



AND THE PEACEABLE 165 



The soul of religion, therefore, is still worship. 
A religion which is mere use of the moral scourge, 
angry and hortatory and primarily concerned with 
having things done, is missing its power as well 
as its peace. It creates nervous excitement not 
strength, foolish interference not calm and efficient 
wisdom. And it is sure to overlook the chief need, 
which is just the spirit of love itself, the only thing 
in the end that can be truly just as well as merciful. 

A distinguished statesman has told us that the 
first business of the Church is to keep statesmen 
alive to the claims of justice and want, and so to 
forward reform, remove oppression, remedy poverty 
and ill-health, and gradually eliminate all human 
ills. For the church in the atmosphere of which 
enthusiasm for that aim cannot flourish little is to 
be said. But the church which does not derive this 
from a higher inspiration has also missed its vocation. 
Even for the economic battle we have to do more 
than fight self-interest with other self-interests; and 
for peace in the world we have to do more than 
oppose violence to violence. No device has ever yet 
been discovered whereby in such battles the weakest 
do not go to the wall. To have any hope of success 
we have to put the whole matter on the level of 
reverence for man as man, justice as in God's sight, 
pity as between fellow-travellers from time to 
eternity, compassion as from those who need 
compassion, responsibility for talents, wealth, oppor- 
tunity, privilege, as gifts from God wherewith to serve. 



1 66 THE PEACEMAKER 



This means that no one can be a true peacemaker 
who has not God's peace, which is just God's love, 
in his heart. He must be a man, the current of whose 
life runs too deep for earthly strife to ruffle, because 
it springs from the perennial fountain of pardon, 
grace and eternal life. If that be the source of his 
power, the first need of his life will be a fellowship 
in worship, a fellowship where he will unite with all 
his brethren, master and workman, friend and foe, 
to look up into the face of their common Father. 
Especially it will be a fellowship where he will see 
God's face in the face that was more marred by con- 
flict with the world's sin and sorrow than any man's, 
and yet in which is seen, as nowhere else, the glory 
of God. 

As we stand before the Cross, seeing the nails 
and the scourge and the crown of thorns, but hearing 
only pitying forgiveness and the assurance of a 
finished work, pardon and peace should settle on 
our faces also and the clamour of evil should be 
silenced and the paltriness and uncertainty of our 
own endeavour be taken up into the Divine sacrifice 
and service for men. 

That must be the inner sanctuary of our worship, 
and there only can we find the perennial source of 
our peace. But it is also a sanctuary where no de- 
mand, however clamorous, however conflicting, can 
be inconsistent with our worship. No worship, how- 
ever rapt and serene, should be inconsistent with any 
conflict, any duty, any problem, any distress. 



AND THE PEACEABLE 167 

Except we never divorce the things of conflict and 
of calm which God has joined, we cannot be the 
peacemakers, who are called the children of God 
because, like Him, they are opponents of every evil, 
yet abide in the calm of the unchanging vision of 
good, because they have at once the light of tem- 
poral battle in their eyes and the peace of eternity 
in their hearts. We shall thus abide possessed of the 
true weapon^ of our warfare, which are forbearance, 
pity, justice; and we shall ever employ them in the 
power of the spirit of love, and be peacemakers who 
are ourselves at peace. 



XIII 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 

I Samuel x. 7. 'And let it be, when these signs are come unto thee, 
that thou do as occasion serve thee; for God is with thee.' 

1 Saul went forth to seek his father's asjses and found 
a kingdom' sounds like a transformation in fairy land, 
but Saul himself was far from certain that the asses 
were profitably exchanged. 

Unwillingness to rule, Plato says, is the first quali- 
fication for a ruler. In that respect Saul was well 
equipped: and for the good reason of thinking the 
honour small and the responsibility great. But this 
qualification, however convincing to others, can hardly 
impress its possessor, if, like Saul, he perceive no 
other fitness either in himself or the position of his 
family. 

Nor could anyone have seen much more than he 
saw himself. A young farmer, more concerned about 
his strayed asses than his oppressed country, and with 
a notion of religion as a device for discovering their 
whereabouts, was not a very promising agent to stir a 
patriotic and religious revolt in a people sunk in abject 
submission to a vigilant and powerful oppressor. Nay, 
any man ever born might have shrunk from the task 
proposed to Saul of collecting an army under the eyes 
of so wary a foe and arming it and feeding it in a 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 169 

country carefully searched for weapons and foraged 
for provender. 

What wonder, then, if the consecrating oil made 
Saul feel rather like a victim anointed for sacrifice 
than a royal person, while the shadowy crown made 
his head feel loose upon his shoulders, as though a 
breath would sigh it off. 

Nor did Samuel himself, who launched him on 
this perilous voyage, think very differently of the 
man Saul was. What he anointed was the man Saul 
would become when God's signs had come unto him. 
This becoming another man was the Prophet's sole 
programme for a national hero and deliverer: and 
other plan or caution or hint of method he offered 
none. Become the right man, then take the first cur- 
rent at its flood. 'Thou shalt do as occasion serves, 
for God is with thee': and that was all. 

These signs, at first sight, seem purely accidental 
and arbitrary, with no natural fitness either to direct 
to a right use of occasion or to assure God being with 
him. But a closer view will show that they are the 
sole authentic signs of an eye that sees and a heart 
that ventures. 

As his first sign, Saul would meet two men by 
Rachel's sepulchre at Zelzah on the border of Ben- 
jamin, who would tell him that the asses he went to 
seek were found, but that his father had left off caring 
for the asses and was saying, ' What shall I do for 
my son?' 

This was all familiar enough. Many a time no 



i_7o THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 

doubt before he had visited the sepulchre of Rachel, 
the ancestress of his tribe. Nor could it have been 
information that his father, however keen a husband- 
man, loved his son above his cattle. But life's great 
signs are seldom new. What transforms men is a new 
discovery of the meaning of the old, of the elemental 
and eternal in the familiar and commonplace. 

Jacob had passed over Jordan with nothing but 
his staff. He came back over it with oxen and asses, 
flocks and man-servants and maid-servants, and all 
a country-bred mind could imagine of opulence. 
Kish, Saul's father, was, in his own degree, another 
Jacob. And for Saul a similar career stood for all 
the world could offer of dazzling success. But ere 
this simple way-side grave and the vision of his 
father, wandering, like Jacob, among his substance, 
bereaved and desolate, had finished speaking to 
him, he saw, with the fresh wonder of new discovery, 
how much more life depends for its value on what 
we love than on what we have. Here in love of 
husband and wife, father and son, was a good, 
precious beyond flocks and herds and even kingdoms, 
nay even life itself. 

Was not that an authentic sign for a national 
deliverer, seeing how it revealed to him the true 
cause he was to champion, and manifested its 
worthiness to command all hazard and sacrifice? 
While his own safety was surely as important as 
the security of his neighbour's sheep-cotes, the 
inviolable sacredness of his neighbour's hearth was 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 171 



another matter. Could Saul make every home in 
Israel a peaceful sanctuary for the love of husband 
and wife, parent and child, even if the end of his 
enterprise should be a way-side grave where hands 
that loved him laid him, as Jacob had laid Rachel, 
his life would have been spent to purpose, and 
death be a small price for so high a gain. 

A serious view of life, Matthew Arnold says, is 
the first mark of a true poet. Many failings he may 
have, but a frivolous estimate of man by his worldly 
trappings must not be one. Reality must lie for 
him in the experiences of the heart, and they, and 
not man's estate, must absorb his interest. The 
story of Rachel and the grave at Zelzah is the very 
stuff of poetry: the prosperity of Jacob, through 
overreaching his astute father-in-law, will sing 
itself into no song. Similarly, without something of 
this poetic gift in his soul, interpreting life by the 
authentic sign of love for his fellows simply as men 
and women, no man can discover God's true in- 
heritance, or have any call to be a captain over it. 
He must not see men merely in the mass, as so 
many hands for work or units for armies, or distin- 
guish them only by position and wealth, but he 
must see each with his own strange, eventful story 
of love's young dream and manhood's loyalties, of 
fellowship and loneliness, of hope and despair, of 
success and failure, and the mystery of death must 
shed dignity for him even on the commonest. The 
man who misses this sign, though he attain all else 



172 THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 



that place and fortune can provide, remains in 
God's real kingdom a mere hewer of wood and 
drawer of water. 

As the first sign showed Saul his true task, the 
second instructed him as to the means for achieving it. 

At the oak of Tabor he was to meet three men 
going up to God at Bethel, one carrying three 
loaves, another three kids and the third a bottle 
of wine. They were to salute him and give him 
two loaves, which he was to receive of their hands. 

This also was no new experience, for Bethel was 
the central sanctuary of his tribe, whither he had 
probably gone up many a time himself carrying 
just such offerings, and the oak of Tabor with its 
fresh, vivid green against the brown upland had 
probably been a landmark to him from childhood. 
An oak tree, with its verdant, whispering shade, 
in a landscape where all else is parched and brown, 
is so impressive a sight that it has often attracted 
to itself the worship which is due only to the Power 
who sustains it. This sense of the wonder of nature 
around came into Saul's heart as he saw it, but the 
men with their offerings carried his thoughts beyond 
to the worship of God above. He felt, even if he 
could not express it, the same lesson as our Lord 
taught from the lilies of the field, clothed by God's 
hand in a splendour greater than Solomon in his 
glory. 

Then the two loaves, on their way to the sanctuary 
and diverted to his use, became a sacrament to 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 173 



attest that he who fights God's battles can trust God 
for the resources, though only, it may be, in daily 
bare provision. There are but two loaves, one for 
himself and one for his servant. Of the kids 
and the wine nothing is offered. Here was the 
promise of the strictest necessaries of life for himself 
and those who should rise at his bidding. But there 
were no superfluities, no luxuries. Saul, who was 
to secure to every one in Israel the produce of his 
flock and make his vine a shelter under which he 
might sit unafraid, was himself to do his work on 
bread and drink of the brook by the way, glad to 
know he would come through, and not greatly caring 
how. In that spirit he was to take these two loaves, 
gladly and gratefully, as the sign that a man whose 
soul is nourished by the sense of high enterprise can 
be content to be assured of each day's sufficient bread, 
not only in mere food, but in every other kind of 
supply. 

This is the faith in God which has always equipped 
captains over His inheritance. They have always seen 
the superfluities, and though they of all men most 
deserved them, they have seldom enjoyed them, 
but, being absorbed in high creative tasks, they do 
not suffer envy nor turn aside to forage for better 
rations. All the world's greatest benefactors, the 
men who have spent themselves to make life beauti- 
ful or just or good, have had little of the kids and 
the wine. 

Possibly the chief reason why our successes lately 



174 THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 

were so merely material, our work in every higher 
department so unoriginal, our leaders so lacking the 
stamp of greatness, was the absence of this sign of 
the two loaves, set in the wonder of nature around 
and the adoration of God above. 

As a third sign Saul would come to the hill of God, 
where is the garrison of the Philistines. From the 
high place — the sanctuary at the top — a company 
of prophets come down meeting him, with a psaltery 
and a tabret, and a pipe and a harp before them. 
They prophesy and he prophesies with them. Then 
he is finally and completely turned into another 
man. 

The first sign showed the true scope of Saul's 
enterprise, and the second the true nature of his 
resources. Yet many a man has had a splendid 
vision, enriched with all the hues of human interest, 
of what he might do, and has not asked much for 
himself in the doing of it, and it has still come to 
nothing, because he could not at once look stead- 
fastly in the face of stern reality and lift up his heart 
in prophetic hope. But this third sign united for 
Saul the seemingly incompatible experiences of a 
new realisation of the power and oppression of the 
garrison of the enemy on his native hill and the 
hope of deliverance by the might and goodness of 
the God whose sanctuary still hallowed it. And 
what is the final authentic sign of victory, if not 
that our native hill, being also God's hill, cannot 
forever be the seat of violence and wrong? Nor is 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 175 

hope ever sure till it vindicate itself where depressing 
realities meet us oftenest and harass us most. 

This sight was least of all new. Every day, as 
he went about his work, it had been under his eyes. 
What is here called Gibeah of God or God's Hill, 
is elsewhere called Gibeah of Saul or Saul's Hill. 
On the very spot where he had played as a child and 
pastured his cattle and tilled his ancestral acres was 
the garrison of the Philistines, the very fortress from 
which his native land suffered base oppression. It 
was as familiar to him as his own homestead; and 
perhaps it had been as unquestioned hitherto, just as 
we accept the hovels unfit for human habitation at 
our back-door or the long bar at the end of our street 
as the eternal order of things. 

But now the scales of custom fell from his eyes 
and the fresh glory of the spot that was his by birth 
and habitation shone out upon him. By every experi- 
ence that had gone to the making of him in God's 
image it was for him, above every other place on 
earth, God's Hill, on which the garrison of the Philis- 
tines was no matter of course, but a fresh desecration 
of its sacredness every day the sun rose upon it. 
There beside it was the high place, God's own im- 
memorial sanctuary, and now he felt with every fibre 
of his manhood that the two had no right to exist 
together. 

Yet, without the other sight which gladdened his 
eyes, he might have felt this only with blind and im- 
potent rage. From this most basely contaminated, 



176 THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 

yet most sacred seat of his own ancestral home 
came down a company, with no lament of vanished 
glories or wailing over present oppressions, but 
adding to their own cheerful voices every instru- 
ment of joyful and soul-stirring music on which 
they had been able to lay their hands. Thus they 
proclaimed themselves prophets, living in God's 
great triumphant future though willing to abide 
God's time, aware even now of the wisdom of His 
discipline but never doubting the certainty of His 
deliverance. 

What wonder that Saul responded to their inspira- 
tion and won for the moment a prophetic insight into 
the great, heroic, divine elements in the heart of his 
people to which he could confidently appeal, and be- 
came such a man that, though, when it was a question 
of honour, he hid himself like a child, when it was 
a question of danger, he went to meet it as a lover 
goes to his mistress. 

Under this inspiration he made such an impres- 
sion of lovableness and power and self-forgetfulness 
on all who followed him, that they never lost for 
him, in spite of all his later sorrowful failure, their 
affection and regard, but sang over his grave the 
lament of David which associated him with Jonathan, 
the son who reminded them of his father in the 
bright days of his youthful and happy and modest 
valour, as 'lovely and pleasant in their lives, yet 
swifter than eagles and stronger than lions.' 

All great deliverances that ever come to the world 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 177 



are wrought by such men as Saul when God's 
signs came upon him. Nor is there any limit to 
their possible achievement when they go forward, 
well knowing what they do, in the teeth of all 
prudent calculation of visible forces, assured only 
of a might which works for the free soul of man 
and the gracious things of human lives and for a 
righteous rule between man and man. They have 
no need to have pointed out to them the occasion 
which serves their purpose or to be directed in the 
right use of it when it comes, or to be encouraged 
in the faith to venture on its call, for they have in 
them the signs of love and faith and hope which 
enable them to discern its opportunity, seize upon 
its advantage and open their hearts to its inspiration. 
They are no visionaries, but see the bitter, distressing, 
discouraging reality, with a clearness eyes blinded 
by custom never attain. But they are men of vision, 
and they see that the final power is in the heart of 
man God has made in His own image and in the 
God who can touch it to a finer emotion capable of 
great and splendid consecration. 

When life seems to be passing us in drab monotony 
and dull trivialities, and we feel our days are barren 
because we have been denied the opportunities 
lavished upon more fortunate men, is the true 
reason that the occasion has never come or is it 
that we are without the signs for discovering and 
using it? Like Saul, when he had lost these signs 
and become another man, worse for the loss of 



o. s. 



12 



178 THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 

what he once possessed, when his joy in service and 
strength in responsibility had changed to a settled 
gloomy envy and weak frenzy of suspicion for the 
honour of his own estate, we meet even great occasions 
with dismay and handle them as mere soothsayer's 
destiny and fortune, as an accident merely happening 
to us and not as an event appointed us for ourselves to 
turn to good and for manifesting to all men that God 
is with us. 

Has occasion, thus judged, ever greatly served the 
wisest and best, the true benefactors of our race? 
Socrates found his occasions as a barefooted private 
soldier on a winter campaign or talking to young men 
in the open market-place or at social gatherings which 
without him would have been frivolous and not very 
sober entertainments. Paul found his among small 
groups of humble people at a prayer-meeting, or in 
lawcourts with an atmosphere more of legality than 
justice, or in a prison-cell with no accessories save an 
occasional humble friend and writing material. Shake- 
speare's special occasion was his father's bankruptcy, 
and Wordsworth's nothing but plain country-folk and 
the hills and the sky. 

But above all, how did occasion serve the life 
which wrought man's supreme deliverance, and that 
not only in its great and heroic moments, but in 
its every word and work? There was nothing in 
it which might not happen to any of us, and very 
little which does not happen to all of us almost 
every day. A few great ones of the earth Jesus did 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 179 



encounter, but to little profit. The people with 
whom His occasions of wisdom and power and love 
came were humble, ordinary, ill-educated, hard- 
working, and not specially gifted in any way. 
Which of us would find occasions for penetrating 
judgment, sublime teaching, supreme action, when 
we saw weeds flourishing in a field, or children 
playing in a square, or a wastrel going to the dogs, 
or a woman who had sold her virtue, or a man of 
bad repute seized with a fit of curiosity? Yet these 
are our occasions exactly as they were His. Nor may 
you suppose you would make more out of the occa- 
sions in His life which you have not met than out 
of those which you have. Relentless and implacable 
enemies, public opposition and secret intrigues, an 
unjust trial and a shameful and cruel execution are 
not what we mean by occasion serving us. 

Nor did He ever act except as occasion served. 
He had no programme except the right use of life 
as it came, and especially His right service of men 
as He met them. The only event He ever planned — 
the triumphal entry — has its significance from the 
contrast with all the rest of His doings. All His 
life happened, if you like to put it so, by accident, 
but He did, what no one else ever did, He took 
out of every occasion all that was in it, so that all 
His life, and not merely some particular heroic 
moment, was God's occasion and the manifestation 
that the Father was with Him. 

This supreme use of occasions available for us 

12 — 2 



i8o THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 



all He made by having, not in one moment of 
exaltation but uninterruptedly all His days, the 
signs open to us all. He knew and valued every 
one He met — and not least what others thought 
the lost soul, as he valued himself, or rather as 
his Father in Heaven knew and valued him. 
With the fine penetration of perfect sympathy He 
knew what was in man, and, whether He was stern 
or gentle, peremptory or patient, He never made 
a mistake in dealing with anyone. 

No trapping ever stood between him and the soul 
of man, and just as little did any material obstacle 
stand between Him and the spiritual ends He set 
before Himself. Poverty had no terrors for Him, care 
for the future no burden, misrepresentation no dis- 
may, and the might of men and the fear of agony or 
death never turned Him from the way that had in it 
His true call and opportunity. 

All this He did in no dubiety about the evil in 
the heart of man, the hypocrisy in his religion, the 
rule of the Father of Lies in his society. Yet there is 
not a note of querulousness, or shrill impotent rage, 
but the most essential and unchanging quality of His 
spirit is a calm strong note of triumph, with a quiet 
undertone of the blessedness of love's kingdom, as 
if in His life all the stars of God sang together, and 
never for a moment as if the highest men knew might 
only be a great perhaps. The reason was not only 
that God was with Him, but that He was in the 
Father and the Father in Him, so that He lived 



THE MAN AND THE OCCASION 181 



unchangeably and luminously in the light of the 
knowledge that no event in life could be so evil as 
not to be God's occasion. 

To-day, more anxiously perhaps than ever in the 
history of our people, we are looking for captains 
over God's inheritance, and our minds fly to great 
men and great occasions. But, if we truly looked 
for them in the name of the Captain of our Salvation, 
should we not look instead for God's signs to teach 
us all to see and use all occasions in the might of 
His succour ? These signs are still the old authentic 
signs which yet make all things new, even love and 
faith and hope. Were we by them made other men, 
our occasions would serve us as well as anything 
more exalted we might imagine, even for the great 
and high deliverances we think we need. If it be 
so that God anoint us to be kings for such high 
tasks, we shall not need to shrink or be dismayed. 
But for working out the true salvation of our land 
from the powers of evil, and for emancipating all 
that is free and high and holy in the souls of men, 
He has anointed us all to be kings and priests unto 
Him : and He requires a heroic task from us, even 
if it be only in our own homes, where perhaps all 
our best occasions are found. 

We shall never see them or find God's help in 
them without His signs, enabling us to look through 
the outward appearance to the heart of things and 
especially to the hearts of men. But then all occa- 
sions will be at our command. 



XIV 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

Mark xi. 13. c For the time of figs was not yet.' 

This whole incident seems strangely unlike the 
convincing reasonableness of the rest of the Gospels. 
How could One, for whom the shooting blade was 
a symbol of the Kingdom of God and the lily was 
arrayed beyond Solomon in all his glory, blast the 
promise of anything that grows? But these words 
read like the very essence of unreason; for why 
should a tree be cursed for not bearing fruit out of 
season? How could He who was so patient with 
failure, even after it had enjoyed every opportunity, 
pass a judgment so hasty and so unjust? 

The lesson, moreover, seems to strike a false note 
in a ministry, which, though carried through in a 
few crowded months, is singularly free from driving 
and hurry, and possessed of leisure to observe the 
flowers and the children and the fields and the 
sky. Above all how does it accord with the patience 
and quiet insight which enabled Jesus to deal 
adequately with the needs of all who sought His 
help? Nothing else suggests that, even under the 
strain of those closing days, He fell from this gentle 
reasonableness and began to require men to produce 
fruit out of the course of nature, to force the doors 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 183 

of opportunity, to live lives richer than their experi- 
ence, to render service beyond the growth of their 
souls. Such a violent spirit of haste has often possessed 
His Church, but it never assailed the gracious spirit 
of its Founder. 

Nor, rightly understood, are these words an ex- 
ception. Just what seems unreasonable in them is 
what gives reasonableness to the whole incident. 

The warning it conveys becomes clear when we 
realise that the time of the fruit harvest represents 
the time of the fruition of God's purpose in the 
earth, the coming of His Kingdom. It was addressed 
to the thought in the mind of the disciples that the 
Day of the Lord was at hand and that they had only 
to await its coming in unproductive impatience. 

This coming of the Kingdom our Lord describes 
in many figures. It is a feast at which He will sit 
with His disciples, love's fulfilment when the rule of 
violence shall be ended, treasure found after weary 
search, a jewel purchased at the price of all we 
possess. But the favourite figure is this of the harvest, 
which is to justify all God's husbandry, with its use 
of the pruning-knife and its disregard to shelter 
which cannot keep out the storm without keeping 
out also the sun and the rain. 

Our Lord taught that this Kingdom was at hand, 
and He meant the expectation to be supreme in 
the lives of His followers. They were to lift up 
their eyes and see the fields white to the harvest; 
and, knowing that it was both near and sure, they 



1 84 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

were to pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth 
other labourers, and not themselves to sit still with 
folded hands. 

Our supreme temptations lie very near our su- 
preme inspirations: and this is no exception to the 
rule. The wrong way of waiting upon the God who 
will, in their season, provide the fruits of the earth, 
the way which ungirds the loins and unnerves the 
hands, is not far apart from the right way, the way 
which inspires and braces and stirs the heart. 

At this moment the disciples were waiting in the 
wrong way. Their hope of the Kingdom had ceased 
to be an inspiration and had become an enervation. 
They asked only when it would come, not how 
they should rightly await its coming. Now as later, 
the first question always hovering on their lips was, 
' Wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to 
Israel?' The disciples were spiritual men, and that 
was no merely material hope, but, if they sought a 
spiritual kingdom, it was in unspiritual ways. It 
was a kingdom that was within, but they expected 
it wholly from without ; it was a victory of righteous- 
ness, but they expected only a victory of power ; 
it was a call to service and a temper of humility, 
but they thought that they had only to wait till 
they were called to rule. They might still be said 
to live by hope, but it was a hope which was merely 
marking time, a hope which counted for nothing 
in the interval. That it would be a time of special 
call and opportunity they did not dream. God was 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 185 

to bring in His Kingdom in all power and splendour, 
and their patience was to be exercised only in waiting 
with upward look and folded hands. 

Their Lord, on the contrary, meant this hope to 
be a trumpet-call to high enterprise. The Lord God 
omnipotent reigns, therefore they also must reign as 
kings; His triumph was secure, therefore they now 
must be more than conquerors. Their thinking was 
not useless nor their working vain, for the very 
reason that the result of God's thinking and working 
would in time appear. The assurance that He works 
the willing and the doing was to inspire them to 
work out their own salvation, not only with fear and 
trembling, but with confidence and peace. 

The incident is a warning, therefore, not to 
undervalue the times of more limited blessing and 
the less obvious working of God, and, especially, 
not to neglect the present with such opportunity 
as is offered and such success as is accorded. Though 
the Kingdom of God may have come only in some 
small measure for our own souls, we must bring 
forth now, in such measure as our special privileges 
admit, and not wait to attain in the general procession 
of the seasons. As the specially sheltered tree heralds 
the autumn by bearing as though summer had com- 
pleted its work in all the land, so we must herald 
its coming for the world by showing that it is already 
within ourselves. 

If that be the meaning of the offending phrase ' The 
time of figs was not yet,' we may now see why this 



1 86 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 



incident appears at this solemn point in the sublimest 
of all tragedies. 

At first sight the fate of a fig-tree seems utterly 
beneath the dignity of the occasion, when such vast 
human issues were being decided. We cannot sup- 
pose it is introduced, like the lighter scenes in the 
tragedies of Shakespeare, to relieve the mind for 
a moment, in order, by a quickened feeling and a 
sense of contrast, to make it more sensitive to the 
agony that follows. For that purpose it is far too 
sombre. But it does come in for another reason, 
which Shakespeare also well understood, that when 
the feelings are deeply moved by great events, the 
most trivial incident may have the deepest 
significance. 

Jesus was going up to Jerusalem to His last 
great day of appeal and conflict. He was fasting, 
and even a handful of figs would have sustained His 
strength for a task which was to try His physical 
powers to the utmost. The leaves promised fruit, 
but He found none : and no wealth of fruit any tree 
in the world could ever produce would have the 
value of the poorest handful of figs which would 
have served the Master's need in that supreme 
hour. 

Most of you have something in your own experi- 
ence to help you to understand how that moment 
of disappointment would live on in the memory of 
the disciples. You recall perhaps some last wish, 
some last look of disappointment, appealing to you 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 187 



out of the gathering shadows of the great darkness, 
which you could not meet, and which, even after your 
deepest sorrow has changed to tender and gracious 
recollection, still comes with sharp pain every time 
it returns to your memory. 

The fig-tree itself need not detain us. In Palestine, 
it is said, a ripe fig or two might be found at any 
season. Or this particular tree may have enjoyed 
such special advantages of sun and shade, that, 
had its energies not all been spent on leaf, it might 
have had ripe fruit. And, in any case, it had no 
fruit at all, which is a singular thing in a fig-tree 
at any time. All we need concern ourselves about 
is that our Lord had reason to expect fruit, that the 
appearance of the tree encouraged His hope, and 
that He found only the luxuriance of foliage which 
is the fore-runner of death. 

The lesson, which is our true concern, is the 
very simple one which the stirring of new life every 
spring-time teaches. Then, and not in the autumn, 
the issue is decided. You go out in the March 
weather and you see a timid blossom in a sheltered 
nook. You may say, Here is a rash venture likely 
to be nipped in the bud by the late frost or to 
shiver to death in the east wind. But you may also 
say, Here is the potency of summer already on its 
way. The spring is a call, which, if it is not answered 
at once, will never be answered at all. Where life 
is stirring, it is not only striving to produce fruit, 
but to produce it at the earliest moment. If it will 



1 88 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 



not hasten to brave the sharp spring winds with 
blossom, it will gladden no harvest, either soon or 
late, with fruit. And it must respond to its own 
warmth and shelter, and not wait till all the earth 
is filled with sunshine. 

The poet speaks of shining like a good deed in 
a naughty world. But the venture of faith is more 
even than that. It is the wave which rises higher 
on the shore, because it has behind it the whole 
might of the tidal billow; or, as here, it is the first ripe 
fruit which comes with the potency of the ripening 
year. And when we think of it, what figure speaks 
of vaster, more transforming power than this quiet 
influence of the seasons, this invigorating ally of 
all that lives! 

It means that we must embrace our own oppor- 
tunities and not wait for opportunity in general; 
use our special warmth and shelter and not wait 
till the sun warms all winds and bathes all nature 
in heat; ourselves herald the autumn and not wait 
to be its tardy result. 

It is the great, urgent, everyday, insistent lesson 
of life, that to sit waiting for fuller opportunity is 
to miss all opportunity, late as well as soon. You 
may not be daunted by less favourable conditions 
and fold your hands and merely wait for better, 
but you must do the little you can when circum- 
stances are adverse ere you can expect to use them 
to better purpose when they are favourable, just as 
you must consecrate your powers when they are 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 189 



feeble if you are to employ them effectively in their 
maturity. 

Yet it is more than this, because it is not a 
demand, but an inspiration. When there stirs in 
your heart the vaguest desire to help your struggling 
brethren, when you put forth the worst directed 
effort to help them, when some gentle and kind 
impulse hides itself modestly amid the visible 
pretence and show of your lives, you have not 
discovered merely an untimely blossom, which will 
bear little fruit with the best success and most likely 
suffer blight in the chill social winds around you, 
but you have the promise that God's summer 
draws nigh, a foretaste of all the warmth and fruit- 
fulness of the Kingdom of God, of which you may 
be sure that God needs the fruit if it prosper, and 
that He will see the promise of life in it, even 
though it fail. 

We can now see why our Lord goes on to speak 
about the faith which removes mountains. It is not 
merely because the fig-tree has died at His word. 
Any of us could kill a fig-tree : none of us can remove 
a mountain. And the spirit of that appeal would 
be equally unlike our Lord. He would have been 
giving a sign in the very form He always repudiated. 
But He too is thinking of the coming of the Kingdom 
of God: and He warns the disciples that while 
their way of looking for it is death, His way is life 
and victory. Nothing, He means, need dismay 
you, nothing be deemed impossible, because you 



190 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

are producing fruit with the ripening year on your 
side, because the Kingdom of God is at hand and 
all you do is already of its power. Only use this 
hope of a fuller day which is coming as an inspira- 
tion and not as an excuse, and nothing is beyond 
your reach. 

The handful of early fruit which might have 
stayed the Master's hunger on the day of His 
supreme conflict, and which was not forthcoming, 
is typical of most of our human failures. The high- 
way is never made, because none were found to beat 
the track. 

In all life it is the pioneer who counts. A great 
many people could make as good poetry as Cowper, 
but in which of them could be heard a new note 
of nature and truth, heralding a new age of song? 
Any of us can go to America to-day, but that takes 
nothing from the merit of Columbus. The pope 
may be set right to-day as a pastime, but that is 
because Wicliffe did it when it seemed a madness. 
With a little assurance, we could any of us preach 
at Athens to-day, but that detracts nothing from 
the splendour of the amazing solitary figure of 
Paul facing the Areopagus. 

The act which has everything on its side — know- 
ledge and custom and human approval — does no 
mighty work in the earth. Yet knowing that, we 
may still, by some illusion, think we have no call to 
go ahead of the crowd. Every young man worth his 
salt dreams of being a pioneer in something. But 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 191 



he excuses himself from beginning, by the reflection 
that the time is not yet. Most of us take up the 
attitude that nothing can be done till the current 
sets strongly in our favour and bears us along, 
almost in our own despite. As children we think 
things will happen by the mere force of growing 
up; as young people that we must grow wise and 
worthy by the mere process of the years; as persons 
of middle life, that age, by the mere process of 
decay, will make us unworldly and good, because it 
will leave us no temptation to be otherwise. We 
forget that the future has no promise which does 
not declare itself in present achievement, and that 
nothing ever comes by mere lapse of time except 
dissolution. We forget that we can grow in folly 
as in wisdom, in worldliness and pride as well as 
in humility and love. We forget, in short, that the 
significant time for everything is not the time when 
all impulses are in our favour, and all votes on 
our side, but is, on the contrary, the time when 
we see only half truths, follow doubtful glimpses 
of reality, meet cold indifference and hard rebuffs, 
that, in short, the significant time, the time which 
determines all harvests, is the opening year with 
the bite of winter still in it, and not autumn with 
its breathless calms and its mellow heat. 

This incident, then, is a demand for the pioneer, 
and in it, throughout, his supreme value is assumed. 
Yet the lesson does not preach to us merely that 
we should all endeavour to be pioneers. It speaks 



192 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

of faith and not of effort, of the Rule of God and 
not of the will of man, of a power which can make 
even us ordinary people, without high courage, 
clear initiative, or great originality, true pioneers of 
God's Kingdom. The venture of faith is not to 
thrust ourselves in the face of events, and carve our 
way through a hostile world, but to discern God's 
large purposes and feel the inspiration of His new 
world. And it is because Jesus Christ means for 
us this new vision and inspiration, and not a mere 
exhortation to brace ourselves and steel our hearts, 
that we speak of faith in Him and not merely of belief 
in what He teaches. 

A few weeks after this event the Disciples them- 
selves showed how they had learned the lesson. 
A day came when they stood alone in Jerusalem, 
face to face with the men who had crucified their 
Master and with their cause discredited in the eyes 
of the people. Every counsel of prudence urged 
delay. God's power had already been manifested to 
them in the Resurrection, and they had every reason 
to hope that it would display itself to the world 
yet more plainly in a new age. Was it not common- 
sense to wait till this arrived? Yet something had 
happened in the soul of a fisherman who had 
known how to be rash but not how to be brave, 
whose uncultured country accent betrayed his origin 
and who had no equipment save the faith which 
enabled him to say the word which removed the 
mountain, and to say it at the moment. He touched 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 193 

the hearts of the very men who had been deaf to 
the Master's own appeal and he made the very 
lips which had cried, 'Crucify Him/ cry out in an 
agony of penitence. Had he, on that day, judged 
that no prudent and successful effort could be made 
till God had done something more to bring in His 
Kingdom, had he not forgotten all timidities in the 
assurance that the Kingdom of God had come for 
his own soul, in righteousness and peace and joy in 
the Holy Ghost, then, so far as we can see, it would 
have meant death to Peter's faith and, so far as Peter 
was concerned, to his Master's cause. As it was, 
when Peter had spoken, a new age had come. But 
the reason of his heroism was neither courage nor 
resolution. It was faith. Peter saw God's new world 
and, thinking of nothing else, he simply suffered it 
to speak through him : and it spoke effectively, and 
spoke in time. 

This is what faith in Christ, whose triumph over 
death showed Him to be 'a man approved of God,' 
meant for Peter. It meant for him that he had 
'a Prince and a Saviour' who, he knew, would 
found a kingdom in the lives of men. And he knew 
because it had already been founded in his own 
heart. With that foretaste of its might Peter awaited 
its coming, as a pioneer in its van and not as a mere 
camp-follower in its rear. What it did for him, it 
can do for us, and also in the same way of the in- 
spiration of faith and not the constraining of effort. 
It will not ask us to be different persons and to 
o.s. 13 



194 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

force the doors of opportunity, but will give us 
such a sense of the power which is on our side as 
will enable us to be our true selves, setting before 
us, always on the latch, a great door and effectual 
into our true and immediate service. 

Our lives mean so little because, while we dream 
of some peculiar and unique service, the last thing 
we dream of is of being ourselves unique. We wait 
for some one else to move, or for some common, 
concerted action. In religion, above all, we wait 
for a revival, by which we mean a movement which 
will carry us off our feet by a great common emotion, 
and make belief come without thought, and obedi- 
ence by mere submission to impulse. 

How many, at this moment, in every branch of 
the Church of Christ, are simply saying to them- 
selves, 'The time of figs is not yet.' A few only 
spend their energies manipulating prophecy to dis- 
cover the exact date of the Second Coming, which 
apparently is nearer the less we see of promise in 
the present time, but many more persons do what 
is equally futile. They think this is a very worldly 
age, a very perplexed age, an age in which it is a 
good deal to keep up any appearance of religious 
interest at all. Formerly they urged the need of 
campaigns, and their minds flew to committees 
and subscriptions and printed programmes. To-day 
they are full of schemes to be put into operation 
when our outward troubles are over. All this is a 
way of saying to God, 'Lord, dost thou at this time 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 195 

restore the kingdom to Israel?' They are willing 
to organise so that some day it may happen with 
eclat and commotion, but meantime they do not 
bethink themselves that the Kingdom of God may 
have already come for their own souls, and that it 
can now bring forth its fruit in their own lives, and 
that the Master is in need of it, as He will never 
be in later, it may be more inspired, times. 

But, even when we do not think in this way, too 
often our service is merely of effort and not of faith. 
Our first thought is that we must be quite different 
persons from what we are, and should have all our 
dim trusts and gropings replaced by absolute con- 
victions, with all our resolutions passed through a 
process which will turn them from soft iron into hard 
steel, and that we should make spacious plans and 
force ourselves upon far-reaching enterprises and 
undertake lofty tasks. And what is the result? 
Usually disappointment, often despair, always mere 
words and unrealities. 

But our real need is just to be what God means us 
to be, and to go the way God has set before us, and 
to respond to the appeals God addresses to our own 
hearts — in short, to allow God's Kingdom to come 
for our own souls here and now. 

The early fruit is produced in the same way as 
the late, by the plant turning to the light and the 
heat of the sun. Only it must be sensitive and turn 
even though the clouds may intervene. We are to 
respond better to the truth we see and the grace 

13—2 



196 WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 

we feel — and that is all. Our true concern is not 
our clearness and certainty, but our sincerity and 
simplicity, not our perfect practical guidance, but 
our readiness to put our hand to the task that lies 
nearest to us, while we await further direction as 
God sees good. Not in a view of the whole journey 
from the beginning to the end, but in taking each 
step as we see it, in the certainty that God directs it 
to His own goal, do we serve God. 

You need no conspicuous life, no sphere of 
notable deeds, nothing beyond the ordinary people 
around you and your daily common tasks, if that 
be all God require. Yet you must be prepared for 
high and hazardous demands, if He make them. 
Nor may you expect always a direct and clear call 
or trumpet-summons even to the highest, but must 
often be content to follow the untrodden perilous 
way, aspiring dimly after truth and groping forward 
in the way of duty. But does Christ mean for you 
that in this poor shrivelled fruit of your lives the 
power and glory of God's Kingdom are being 
manifested and that it is the summer of His purpose 
which is breathing life into your soul? Then you 
will be able to be yourself, seeing your own truth 
and hearing your own call even in these dim lights 
and uncertain voices; and you will no longer wait 
to march in companies, or till you are no more 
chilled by want of sympathy, repressed by criticism, 
or crushed by the sense of the vast, dead forces against 
you. Because you know that this dim light and this 



WRONG WAITING FOR GOD 197 



humble, hesitating obedience mean that Christ, with 
all the might and glory of His Kingdom, is on His 
way, because your life, in short, is a life of faith and 
not merely of courage and determination, you will 
show that the Spirit of God is abroad in the earth, 
and you will be ready with your fruit in the day of 
the Master's need. 

Otherwise, it will be the old story — 'Let no man 
eat fruit of thee from henceforth.' 'The harvest is 
past and the summer is ended, and we are not saved/ 



XV 



YOUTH AND AGE 

John xxi. 18. 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, when thou wast young, 
thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest : but 
when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and 
another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.' 

Here we have a picture of Peter young and of 
Peter old, like one of those days, so familiar to our 
climate, which is radiant with sunshine from dawn 
to noon, then steeped in fogs till night descend. 
But is that other than the picture of all youth and 
age ? Perhaps in this very typical nature of his life 
and experience we find the secret of Peter's perennial 
interest. He is just our more virile selves, in whom 
we see intensely and decisively what we ourselves 
are only feebly and vaguely. When he was young, 
he was really young, being buoyant, enterprising, 
free; and, when he was old, he was really old, being 
limited, constrained, distressed. 

'When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself.' In 
our modern figure he was ever ready to take his 
coat off for any task in hand, and needed none to 
help him off with it. Most mistakes he could make, 
but not the supreme mistake of allowing life's 
opportunities to slip past not used at all. 

It may not be youth's privilege to be always 



YOUTH AND AGE 199 



wise, but it ought to be youth's equipment to be 
always enterprising. To lack this is, at any age, to 
be already decrepit; and to set out in life with the 
idea of dodging the primal curse, that anything 
worth doing is to be done only in the sweat of one's 
brow, is merely to be born old. 

Nor is it enough to be ready to face tasks when 
they are imposed on us. To be really young we 
must turn the curse into a joy, girding ourselves 
and going out to seek adventure, and not hanging 
up decision till others have made up their minds 
and decided for us. 

By this measure Peter was pre-eminently young. 
Before others had grasped the situation, he had 
already started to act on it. A fine independence, 
with rapid decision and promptness of word and 
action, proved him in those days daringly, originally, 
energetically young. 

In days of multitudinous societies and fellowships 
and movements, and generally of acting in crowds^ 
even the young are in danger of losing this mark 
of youth. Fellowship is a very fine thing, and youth 
is essentially clubbable. But the true difference 
between a crowd and a fellowship, is that, in the 
former, we help to sweep each other off our feet, 
and that, in the latter, it is our supreme task to 
help one another to find our own feet. We can misuse 
the best helps, and we misuse the best of all human 
helps— the sympathy of our brethren — when we 
rely wholly on the enthusiasm around us to gird 



2oo YOUTH AND AGE 



us for enterprise and high resolve. The result too 
often is that to sit close together and keep ourselves 
warm is regarded as the end of religion; whereas 
youths true way of being warm is to breast the hill 
and battle with the storm in its own energy and 
purpose. 

Finally, Peter took off his own coat to his own 
enterprise. 'Thou girdedst thyself and walkedst 
whither thou wouldest.' 

Things no one else thought of doing Peter did. 
Into the first confession of Jesus as the Christ he 
walked, the first offer to die with Him, the first 
facing of a hostile world that had crucified his 
Master. Often they were mistaken ways. But 
what mistakes! 'This be far from thee, Lord/ 
'Let us build here three tabernacles.' 'Though I 
should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee/ 
Let us remember, even about his denial, that all 
the others made the same profession, and he alone 
went far enough to be tempted and to fall. 

There above all else is the mark of youth, to 
stake everything with a high heart upon our own 
enterprise. 

He either fears his fate too much 
Or his deserts are small, 
That dares not put it to the touch, 
To win or lose it all. 

To this reproach Peter was never exposed. 

To be young is to feel that the world is before us, 
with all the multitudinous paths which run to every 



YOUTH AND AGE 201 



point of the horizon to choose from, and the one we 
choose truly ours, courageously to be entered and 
steadfastly to be followed. 

But how few are ever young after that fashion ! 
Most make some timid efforts and then find them- 
selves in the beaten path. At most they seek a 
newly beaten path, a recent fashion of thought. 
But, however it afford a pleasant sense of indepen- 
dence and originality, a new heterodoxy is no more 
one's own path than an ancient orthodoxy. So long 
as we merely follow and do not choose of our own 
insight and go on of our own resolution, whether 
it turn out to be the ancient beaten road or the 
recent track, we can arrive at no worthy goal. The 
people God has called to high service have ever had 
a stout heart for their own untrodden, solitary way. 

Have you young people sufficiently before you this 
sense that you may never measure your opinions or 
duties by others, and that there is no way in life 
wholly right for you except your own ? There is even 
some danger at present of regarding a general 
emotion which seems to set in one direction as the 
peculiar manifestation of the Holy Spirit. But God's 
Spirit calls each one to his own life and service; and, 
if we are all moved to do the same thing in the same 
way, let us be very chary about ascribing it to the 
voice of God who has created us all differently after 
His own image. 

Let us make no mistake. It is a fine thing to have 
been really young. A youth over cautious, fearful of 



202 YOUTH AND AGE 



risks, happy only while following the crowd, is not 
the stuff upon which a Church, or for that matter 
any noble enterprise, is ever built. The foundation of 
Christ's Church, as of all else worth building, was 
not the person who had followed the fashion of the 
hour or the custom of the age, but the man for 
whom life was ever a new adventure, who made up 
his mind and tightened his belt to face the worst in 
the way he had chosen, and who ever did it with a 
flash of fresh decision. Here Jesus sees the presence 
of bed-rock, though the fresh, green sward may have 
to be torn up and deeply trenched to reveal it. How 
unlike the superficial judgment which sees it in the 
man of fixed habit and stolid caution, which is only 
as though we were deceived by the likeness of shale 
to stone into seeking under it the enduring granite. 

We older people naturally exaggerate the value of 
experience, as if we grew wise merely by increasing 
years. But we never grow old to any profit unless 
we have been first really young. 

There is an Italian proverb which says, "Not to 
know at twenty is never to know, not to do at thirty 
is never to do, and not to have at forty is never to 
have." Learning, of course, does not stop at twenty 
or doing at thirty or acquiring at forty, but, if we 
miss the insight of twenty or the energy of thirty 
or have nothing accomplished behind us at forty, the 
promise even of the longest life is small. Without 
these fruitful beginnings, the process of growing old 
is a mere tale of darkening insight, of languishing 



YOUTH AND AGE 203 



enterprise, and of increasing poverty of spirit. Get 
this well into your mind, that till you have first been 
young with the high hopes, rapid decisions, and 
tense vigour of youth, you cannot grow old to profit. 
Better any mistake than the supreme mistake of 
wasting your life because you were without the brave, 
indifferent, joyous heart that dared to live. 

'But when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch 
forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and 
carry thee whither thou wouldest not.' All the spon- 
taneity, all the ardour, all the enterprise gone ! The 
inevitable alone left, and such poor submission to it 
as we cannot avoid ! Not getting what we like, but 
doing our poor best to like what we get ! This truly 
is being and feeling old. 

Surely the golden hours are turning grey 
And dance no more, and vainly strive to run : 
I see their white locks streaming in the wind — 
Each face is haggard as it looks at me, 
Slow turning in the constant clasping round, 
Storm-driven. 

The very thought of it chills your blood. Is life, 
which was so buoyant with the call to follow your 
own bent and high resolve, to be reduced to this mill- 
track round which nearly all your seniors seem to 
tread? All kinds of hands gird them. Even little 
infants have giant hands for the purpose. You know 
that a vast number go on day by day accepting all 
kinds of dull drudgeries, driven by needs not their 
own. You feel chilly and grown old already at the 



2o 4 YOUTH AND AGE 



thought of it. How shall you also be girded by 
others and carried whither you would not, when you 
have been properly fitted into your groove! Is it 
strange that a fierce rebellion against this inevit- 
able subjection occasionally glows through your 
veins ? 

Yet the question of how you will submit is even 
greater than the question of how you will choose. 
Inevitable in some way submission will be, but 
whether it be the mere surrender of weakness or the 
consecration of peace depends on how you grow old. 
All alike we must grow old if we live, but we are 
very far from being alike in our way of growing 
old. One way is to shrivel up and become too small 
for life. But there is also the other way of finding life 
become too large for us. 

That is the difference which decides for you the 
value of old age. Does constraint come upon you, 
because you become small or because life becomes 
great ? 

Now let us look at Peter as he grows old. We see 
him faced by a new age which he never was able to 
understand, and in which he never could choose his 
own way and walk in it. Only on the compulsion of a 
vision, could he bring himself to enter the house of a 
Gentile; only when he saw that Cornelius had received 
the same gift as himself, could he cease withstanding 
God ; only when openly rebuked by Paul, did he see 
the inconsistency of calling the Gentiles brethren in 
word and denying it in deed. Never did he rise to 



YOUTH AND AGE 205 



Paul's vision or follow even what he saw with Paul's 
freedom. 

Part of the failure was due just to old age. Had 
he been a younger man, he too might have seen 
the vision of a universal Christianity, and have set 
aside boldly all that stood in its way. Yet we must 
remember that to Peter was given the mission to 
the Jews even as to Paul the mission to the Gentiles ; 
and his perplexities arose from this task, seeing 
how every step he took to a more comprehensive 
fellowship meant the alienation of those he sought to 
win. Further, we must remember that Peter remained 
for Paul one God wrought for as truly as for himself, 
an apostle to the Jew, yet, like himself, to be appro- 
priated by the Gentile, the first witness to the 
Resurrection, as he himself was the last. Nor perhaps 
was his task less necessary than Paul's, for how would 
the Gospel have fared had he not preserved the 
loyalty of those who, like himself, could only see a 
step at a time, and even take it only by the manifest 
compulsion of God? That compulsion, moreover, he 
never opposed. However much the issue was forced 
upon him, in the end he stretched forth his hands, 
and allowed himself to be carried even whither he 
would not. 

But this supreme surrender was not attained 
merely by the limitations of age. It was due to three 
experiences which had so expanded the meaning of 
life that he knew he could not find his way at all 
except by the compulsion of God's will. 



2o6 YOUTH AND AGE 



First, he had learned- his own weakness. He had 
thought that no power on earth could make him 
deny his Master, and he had succumbed to the 
scoff of a servant-maid. None of us know ourselves 
till we have made this discovery; and, once it is 
made, no one walks the ways of life again with the 
same easy confidence. 

Second, he had learned the meaning of the Cross. 
The last word the Master Himself could say was, 
'Not my will but thine be done': and Peter had 
seen this submission turned into God's own victory. 
Who that has ever shared this triumph can be sure 
again that his own way is best ? 

Finally, he had seen a larger vision of the Kingdom 
of God. Dim it may have been and its horizons 
beyond his sight, but how great and spiritual it 
was compared with the restoration of the kingdom 
to Israel for which he once hoped! So measureless 
indeed had it become that God alone could show 
him the way to serve it. 

We too have entered on a new age. Those of 
you who are young may obtain a clear vision of its 
purpose, and see your own way in the midst of it 
and gird your own loins and walk in it by a way you 
see stretching clear before you. And if so, you must 
serve like Paul, not turning from high demands, nor 
hesitating to form large plans, nor in any way being 
disobedient to the heavenly vision. But for many of 
us it will be too late for this way of fresh under- 
standing and new resolve, and all the more if life 



YOUTH AND AGE 207 



has brought us already large responsibilities and 
urgent service. Like Peter, we shall often doubt 
the result and feel constantly the sense of loss. But 
it is God, and not man, who sees the end from the 
beginning. Wherefore, the last question about us 
is not how do we determine, but how do we 
submit. When we live in sincerity and are com- 
pelled to recognise that the belief we fear is true 
or the course of action we think hazardous is right, 
the Master Himself girds us. Do we stretch forth 
our hands, and allow ourselves to be carried even 
though it continue to be whither we would not? 
As the last resort the wisest of us will come to this. 
The vision fades, and we must accept the compul- 
sion of conviction and duty and submit hour by 
hour to the demands of God's will. At the end of 
the day there is no other way in which God can to 
the last be glorified. 

In a special sense this saying is applied to Peter's 
actual death. But only a death of surrender which 
crowns a life of surrender can glorify God. Death 
must be the seal of our lives, even as Christ's 
fulfilling of all righteousness on the Cross was the 
seal and perfection of His life, ere it counts in God's 
service, right dying perfecting right living, 
r . 'Regarding Peter's death there is a tradition, 
which, if not actual history, is at least good com- 
mentary on our text. Peter, we are told, was present 
in Rome when the first great persecution arose. 
He was persuaded to flee, it is said, for the apostolic 



2o8 YOUTH AND AGE 



reason of further service. But Peter was a very 
human person in respect of his own fears, and still 
more in respect of the sorrows of others. And 
even age could not wholly alter his old impulsive 
ways. But as he went out of the gate he met the 
Master going in. "Whither goest Thou?" Peter 
asked. "I go again to be crucified," was the reply. 
Peter accepted the rebuke and returned to obey ' 
the charge, "Feed my flock," at the cost of the 
cross; even as his Master. Then the old question 
"Lovest thou Me?" was answered, as it had never 
been even in all his free and active and buoyant 
youth. While the hand ready to open had shut, that 
ready to close had opened : and the greatest of all acts 
of service to the glory of God was the last. True 
he was girded by others, and he had no choice but 
to submit to what was for him also a cup of agony, 
but he stretched forth his hands, and, in that act, 
his whole soul was given in final and complete 
surrender, in utter trust and love. 

For you too the inevitable day will come. It will 
gird you with violence and carry you whither your 
soul shudders to go. You are not called to choose 
death or love it or even to be free from the shadow 
of its loneliness and uncertainty and terror. Yet at 
that moment your whole life's submission may be 
crowned. If you then surrender all earthly things at 
last willingly into the hands of God, you will glorify 
God in death as never in life. What all your life could 
only imperfectly strive after, will thus be utterly com- 



YOUTH AND AGE 



pleted. May that not be the supreme meaning of 
death ? And, if so, will it not, because it is the perfect 
glorifying of God, be the suitable way into His 
Eternal Glory? 

Straightway I was 'ware 
So weeping, how a mystic shape did move 
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; 
And a voice said in mastery while I strove, — 
'Guess now who holds thee!' 'Death/ I said. But there 
The silver answer rang, — 'Not death but Love.' 



o. s. 



XVI 



A NAME OF APPEARANCE 
AND A NAME OF REALITY 

Jeremiah xx. 3. 'The Lord hath not called thy name Pashur, but 
Magor-missabib . ' 

In a review of an American autobiography I found, 
as near as I can recall it, the following quotation: 
1 Except a passage or two of Emerson, nothing 
ever stirred me so much in my youth as the following 
extract, in Mrs Austen's Fragments from German 
Prose Authors, from Heinzemann, an author of 
whom I never read another word: "Be and continue 
poor, young man, while others around you grow 
rich by fraud and disloyalty; be without place and 
power, while others beg their way upwards; bear 
the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain 
the accomplishment of theirs by flattery; forgo the 
gracious pressure of the hand for which others 
cringe and crawl ; wrap yourself in your virtue and 
seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have in 
such a course grown grey with unblenched honour, 
bless God and die. ,, Yet one should temper this with 
the fine saying of Thoreau, that he did not wish 
to practise self-denial any more than was quite 
necessary. 9 

I have made this long quotation because it sets 



A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



211 



forth for us the difference between the characters 
and successes of these two men, Pashur and 
Jeremiah. Both started together, both were sons of 
priests, both had equal opportunities : and Jeremiah 
was not the one with less ability or feebler character. 
Yet Pashur found popularity and ease the way to 
overflowing success, while Jeremiah found poverty 
and pain and the hatred which is much worse to 
bear, the only way to true manhood. The issue of 
it is that Jeremiah sits in the stocks, the object of 
scorn and ridicule to every passer-by, and Pashur 
is in a position to order it to be done. 

Here is something which actually takes place in 
life: and the meaning of it is worth inquiring into 
and the lesson of it worth pondering. Neither 
Jeremiah nor Pashur wished to practise self-denial 
any more than was quite necessary. Nor should 
anyone ever practise self-denial any more than is 
quite necessary. The sole difference between them 
lay in the kind of necessity each acknowledged. 
And that is the sole difference between any of us. 
What for us is quite necessary? Is it only what is 
physically necessary — the compulsion of the body, 
or is it what is spiritually necessary — the com- 
pulsion of the conscience? What man calls us is 
chiefly determined by the former; what God calls 
us — the infinitely more important consideration — is 
determined wholly by the latter. 

In those old days people did not choose names 
for their children by the sound but by the sense. 

14—2 



2i2 A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



The meaning, they thought, ought to be significant 
of the person who bore the name. Even a name of 
infancy thus represented parental bias and training. 
And as names were not committed to the iron 
custody of the registrar, they could be changed to 
suit later developments of character and fortune. 

To this significance of names Jeremiah refers in 
our text. The origin of Pashur has been sought in 
our day as far away as Egypt, but Jeremiah found it 
nearer home. Pashur the son of Immer he derived 
from ordinary Hebrew words which make them 
mean, 'Prosperity all Round' the son of 'The 
Talker.'- 

Think of that in plain English. Think of it as 
one of those old Puritan names like Son of Humility 
Ford. Put an ordinary English surname to it. Pros- 
perity all Round Ford ! What an auspicious name 
with which to set out in the world ! What a popular 
name it would become, were English parents to 
take to saying what they think! 

Then he was the son of Immer, The Talker. 
No virtue in him would ever lose effect from lack 
of a trumpeter, nor any promotion go past him for 
want of someone to keep asking for it. If your chief 
business in life is to get on, Immer, The Talker, is 
quite clearly the person to have for a father. You 
must not think that it is only in our enlightened days 
that there were rising young men in the Church or 
that they had to wait for the era of the religious 
periodical to have their praises sounded. 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 213 

And Immer had good reason to be satisfied and 
to feel that none of his talk had missed its mark. 
The career of his son was indeed prosperity all 
round, till he became chief officer of the House of 
the Lord, thus attaining the very top of his profes- 
sion. And it is marvellous how ambitions, high and 
low, do succeed, if only a man follow them per- 
sistently and be well supported by his friends. 

But if this was the career of Pashur, what might 
not have been predicted for Jeremiah? In com- 
parison Pashur was a quite commonplace person, 
with the kind of specially uninteresting common- 
placeness which concentration upon the business of 
getting on begets in men. While Pashur was only 
a master of smooth and comfortable platitude, 
Jeremiah had the great gift of the preacher, the 
power of the winged, the unforgettable word. Had 
he not imagination, insight, pathos? And are not 
they the qualities which sway men, and make for 
success in any calling? 

Alas for him, however, his name is not Prosperity 
all Round, the son of The Talker, but Jeremiah, 
'The Lord shall Appoint,' the son of Hilkiah, 'The 
Lord is my Portion.' Therein lies the difference in 
character and career. 

Manifestly Jeremiah's first mistake in the way 
of getting on in the world was his father. To regard 
the Lord seriously as one's portion is apt to make a 
man forgo other more tangible portions both for 
himself and his children. And equally clearly his 



2i 4 A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



second mistake was with himself. His name was 
4 The Lord shall Appoint,' and the man who takes 
that seriously is very apt to find the Lord not appoint- 
ing prosperity all round, but quite other things. 

There you have the secret of their lives. It lies in 
the necessities which determine them. Pashur will 
appoint for himself, and nothing will stand in his 
way except sheer outward obstacle. Jeremiah will 
have the Lord appoint, and everything will stand in 
his way that is not utterly veracious and just. Pashur 
will only be defeated if circumstances are too strong 
for him. No other necessity in the world could de- 
mand from him self-denial. But upon Jeremiah 
another necessity is laid of an entirely different order, 
one which makes circumstances a quite secondary 
and even unimportant consideration. 

The difference appears at once in their preaching. 
Pashur is a shallow enough person, but one fact 
about mankind he has thoroughly grasped — the 
very far reaching one that sugar is sweet in the 
mouth. He built on that as the bottom fact in the 
universe. He preached smooth things, telling his 
hearers that they were the most admirable kind of 
people, whose privileges showed how warmly God 
approved of them, and how, as He was the God 
of Israel, He could not afford to do anything but 
protect them and cherish them and add to their 
blessings. You can imagine what a sweet and 
gracious preacher his audiences found him and 
how good and religious it would make them feel, 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 215 



and what flutterings of approval would pass among 
them, and what a wanton harrowing of their feelings 
and desecration of their sanctuary it would seem 
when Jeremiah, the blunt, rude man, called all this 
lies. 

But when Jeremiah preached, he had no ear at 
all for the voice of his hearers asking for what they 
wanted. The sole voice he heard was the voice of 
the Lord appointing the truth. Then he had only 
awful, heart shaking, soul shattering things to say. 
' Thus saith the Lord of Hosts : Even so will I break 
this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter's 
vessel that cannot be made whole again: and they 
shall bury in Topheth till there be no place to bury/ 
Never in any age could that be popular preaching. 
We ought to be amazed at the moderation of 
Jeremiah's contemporaries that they merely put him 
in the stocks and dropped him into a pit. Our 
national temper on quite modern occasions makes it 
safe to say that we should have been less restrained, 
particularly if we suspected that what he said was 
true. Not by any means do the fates of Jeremiah 
and Pashur belong exclusively to a vanished an- 
tiquity. 

Pashur, we read, as soon as he learned what 
Jeremiah preached about, scourged him and set 
him in the stocks in the most public place he could 
find, there to reflect on the folly of his ways and 
consider how his message might be made fitter for 
polite ears. And with Pashur's view of what was 



2i 6 A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



quite necessary before a man needed to practise 
self-denial, what method of persuasion could have 
been more effective? Unfortunately for the result, 
Jeremiah's view of what was quite necessary was of 
a wholly different order. 

There in the stocks in the high gate of Benjamin 
in the Temple Jeremiah sat all day a target for the 
gibes and the missiles of the thoughtless, scoffing, 
malicious crowd that thronged past. And there, 
when they had all gone, he sat solitary with his 
own thoughts all through the night, with the purple 
parallels of the lash stiffening on his back in the 
chilly night air. 

It was an occasion for thinking seriously of one's 
life; and Jeremiah thought of his as seriously as 
even Pashur could have desired. He also did not 
wish to practise self-denial any more than was quite 
necessary. He too could have won and could have 
enjoyed prosperity. Above all he too could have 
loved his friends. Yet this man, with genius, with 
ardent purpose, with unswerving steadfastness, with 
all the qualities which can set men on the summit 
of life's ambition, arrived now at the time of life 
when his gifts might have brought him wealth, 
honour, troops of friends, is here poor and scorned 
and hated and whipped and pilloried, like a mendi- 
cant or a criminal. 

Jeremiah saw it all, saw it as clearly as Pashur's 
heart could desire, saw it till he burst forth in that 
strange, passionate cry: 'O Lord thou hast deceived 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 217 

me and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I 
and hast prevailed: I am become a laughing-stock 
all the day, everyone mocketh me. . .the word of the 
Lord is made a reproach unto me and a derision all 
the day... I heard the defaming of many, terror on 
every side. All my familiar friends watched for my 
halting/ 

To lie like Pashur could not so much as enter 
into his thought. To be guilty of complicity in his 
country's fate, saying, 'Ye are all good and worthy 
people for whom God can have nothing but blessing 
in store,' was not conceivable for him under any 
pressure of violence. Might he not, however, hold 
his peace? That might not give him the highest 
seat in the Temple with its popularity and honour, 
but it might at least save him from the lowest with 
its scourges and derision. His night of reflection 
there makes him think of not making mention of 
God or speaking any more in His name, which 
was precisely the effect Pashur, having a due regard 
to his own skin, had confidently expected. 

But, when Jeremiah thought of silence, it was as 
a burning fire shut up in his bones. He could no 
more be guilty of complicity in his country's ruin 
by criminal silence than by lies. He had no wish 
to practise self-denial any more than was quite 
necessary, but the final, irresistible, compelling 
necessity only God's word in his heart could lay 
upon him, not any word of man, however enforced 
with scourge or stocks. The crowd might surround 



218 A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



him in the day time with mocking word and angry 
blow and they might leave him in the night to his 
long pain and his long thoughts, but it was all in 
vain while a stronger constraint than theirs lay upon 
his spirit. 

Even the longest night at length will pass. With 
the morning Pashur comes and, of his condescension 
and good pleasure, orders the prisoner to be taken 
out of the stocks. Then, as Jeremiah struggles 
upright on his sore and stiffened limbs, you can see 
the difference between having fire in one's bones and 
only healthy lubricating marrow. You see Jeremiah 
chilled, haggard, weary, with sleepless, burning eyes, 
and you see Pashur with the red of good living on 
his cheeks, the glow of sleep warmed from the fleece 
of his flock, and that sleek and spacious air with 
which success alone can endow its children. 

But, suddenly, all is changed. The authentic 
high officer of God is Jeremiah. It is now Pashur's 
turn to sit white and haggard in the stocks. The 
fire goes from Jeremiah's bones into his eyes and 
his tongue, and he flashes out on Pashur: 'The 
Lord hath not called thee Pashur, Prosperity all 
Round, but Magor-missabib, Terror round About.' 

What the Lord had called him had not concerned 
Pashur much hitherto, but the importance of it 
now came home to him with the insistence of the 
very physical force he understood. ' Thus saith the 
Lord, Behold I will make thee a terror to thyself 
and to all thy friends.' Before his sight they would 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 219 

fall by the sword, and he himself would go captive 
to Babylon and there be slain; while the gain for 
which he had sold his soul would serve only to 
tempt the spoiler. 

There was something to blanch the red of good 
living in his cheek and put a fire of terror in his 
bones to replace the fire of God he had so per- 
sistently quenched. What the Lord had called him 
had come to be, as some day it always must, the 
one matter worth any thought. From that time he 
could only stagger forward, a terror-stricken wretch, 
helpless in the grip of mere physical necessity, 
seeing the calamities his profitable lies and com- 
pliances had provoked sweep himself and his friends 
and all that belonged to them into the abyss. 

Then, at length, the difference between the two 
kinds of necessity to which a man can subject his 
soul can no longer be ignored, for even in that 
submerging flood of ruin and desolation and despair, 
Jeremiah remained 'a defenced city and an iron 
pillar and brazen walls,' the one hope of the stricken 
people he had so long warned in vain. 

With good success in outward things and health 
and manifold activities and attention well fixed 
on what man calls us because of our reputation and 
standing in the world, the stress of life's tremendous 
issues may be long escaped. The notion that life 
is a business of taking up our cross daily may be 
so remote as not even to seem absurd, or become 
the pleasantest unreality, as when one hangs up a 



22o A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



crucifix over the bed whereon his last desire is to 
suffer God to deal with his heart. But sooner or 
later everyone's palace of illusion falls about his 
ears. Then nothing is of any practical concern at all 
except what God has called him, except, that is to say, 
what he really is and how it will ultimately fare with 
him amid the realities God appoints to try his spirit. 

By this I am not meaning to say that the good 
things in your life are wrong in themselves, or that 
you should not accept them gratefully, or that you 
should try to bring troubles in their place. But a 
very smooth life does give cause for asking whether 
it is of our own appointing or of God's and whether 
it is concerned only with appearance or with reality. 
And if you have met no great problems, faced no 
great decisions, stood in no weakness and perplexity 
before great duties, and found nothing to pursue 
more imperative than success, you can be quite 
sure that you have been governed by no necessity 
higher than circumstances, and that some day cir- 
cumstances — if nothing earlier, at least the great 
circumstance of death— will put it all mercilessly to 
the test, and that it will no longer be prosperity all 
round but merely terror round about. 

Other things being equal we should all prefer to 
be Pashur honoured in the chief seat of the temple 
to Jeremiah dishonoured in its lowest. To make 
light of ease and honour and prosperity is only 
another poor unreality. We are not even self-deceived, 
but are only offering ourselves a very foolish kind 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 221 



of incense, when we pretend that they have no 
value for us. But first be sure that other things 
are equal, especially the vital, the victorious, the 
impregnable things both for this life and the next. 
They are just what God appoints, the truth He 
requires you to utter, the deed He requires you to do 
and such consequences of them as He requires you 
to bear. You have only to prefer what is good to 
what merely seems good and leave the rest to 
God. Then let your life be as easy and prosperous 
as God grants. 

To those who already have life's commentary 
upon this old story I would say no more, but I 
should like to add a word to those whose experience 
of life is still to come. 

You are entering upon life, setting out to carve 
your way in the world. Though you do not whisper 
it abroad, you have high hopes and high ambitions. 
May you not yet write your name on the roll of 
fame ? At least the record of your career will surely 
be prosperity all round, a success less conspicuous 
it may be, but not less comfortably substantial 
than you dreamed. In itself that is by no means 
wrong. You are not to go to seek trials; you are 
not to practise self-denial any more than is quite 
necessary. 

But then comes the question: What will you 
find necessary, what will you find the only way to 
true manhood? This at all events you can be sure 
of. It will be concerned not with what you seem to 



222 A NAME OF APPEARANCE 



be but with what you are, not with the pleasant and 
profitable, but with the true and the right. It will 
be what God appoints for you and not what you ap- 
point for yourself, which, even if it be outwardly 
smooth, will not be without inward conflict. And 
the probability is that it will not be smooth either 
without or within. Look upon Jeremiah in the stocks 
in the high gate of Benjamin. Look upon a greater 
than Jeremiah. See Him spit upon, buffeted, nailed 
to the Cross. For you also that is what the everlasting 
wisdom and love may appoint. 

Your heart sickens at the sight. You turn from 
it and you say, you will appoint your own life, and, 
whatever else may be wanting to it, it shall at least 
be prosperity all round. 

But what will that mean? It will mean that you 
quench the fire of God in your bones. Now the fire 
of God is a terrible endowment, and if there were 
nothing beyond what we see, it might be well that 
it should never be kindled in us, that there should 
never be anything in our bones but soft lubricating 
marrow. It is a terrible necessity this, to speak 
God's word, however unpopular, and do God's will, 
however unprofitable. 

But if it is the bed-rock necessity of life, all the 
other necessities of chance and circumstance and 
age and death are at once put in a quite subordinate 
place. Even this life and this material world can 
in a quite amazing manner be put under our feet. 
Nor, without this victory will there be peace, even the 



AND A NAME OF REALITY 223 

poor peace you have chosen, when God's authentic 
messengers of loss and pain shake your souls and • 
drive you back upon reality. 

In the end, though you surrender nothing, the 
final unavoidable force which strips you of home and 
friends and kindred and body and breath, will come 
and ask, what God has called you, and whether you 
have quenched the fire of God, the immortal flame 
which burns up to God Himself and without which 
you are only clay, only of the earth, earthy. 

Surrender you must, and the only question is, 
Under what compulsion ? Is it under God's will or 
only under God's might? In the former case, you 
will be, even amid the wreck of time and the advent 
of eternity, 'an iron pillar and brazen walls,' and, in 
the latter, it will be mere terror round about.' 

This is the word of the Cross, without which no 
life is secure either for time or eternity, for though 
it says, this awful thing may be thy Father's will, it 
also says, this is the will of pardon, of grace, of wise 
love, which leads thee to life, by the way of victory, 
unconquerable strength and never failing peace. 



XVII 



THE LENGTH AND BREVITY OF LIFE 

Psalm lxxiii. 24. 'Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and after- 
ward receive me with glory.' 

A keen sense of the fleeting nature of our mortal 
life is usually thought to trouble only morbidly 
religious minds. Sensible people, it is assumed, 
will relegate the subject to their death-beds. But, to 
ensure success in this forgetfulness, it is even more 
necessary to lack imagination than to lack religion. 

It is not by accident that, in the Old Testament, 
the transitoriness of life is set forth in vivid figure 
and poetic language. To the Wise Woman of Tekoa, 
we are as water spilt on the ground which cannot 
be gathered up again; to the Psalmist, we are as 
grass which flourishes at morning and at even is 
cut down and withered; to the Prophet, we are as 
leaves in an autumn wood being whirled down by 
the wind of our iniquity. These are not the dull 
platitudes of lugubrious piety, but the imaginative 
insight of poetic souls. And most memorable and 
poignant of all are the words of the author of Job, 
one of the supreme poets of all ages. 'Man that 
is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. 
He cometh forth as a flower and is cut down: 
he fleeth also and continueth not ! ' How often have 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 225 



they been spoken over mortal clay ! And how do they 
stir our hearts afresh with every repetition I 

The only passage from all literature which we 
could put alongside it is that which speaks of the 
splendour of the world as 'an insubstantial pageant 
faded/ and of ourselves as 'such stuff as dreams are 
made on.' And that is by the greatest poet of all, 
our own Shakespeare. Nor was ever anyone more 
haunted by the sense of all devouring time, the 
sense that 'nothing stands but for his scythe to 
mow.' And the reason was not that he was morbidly 
religious, but that he was in Milton's words, 'Fancy's 
child,' or, in his own, 'of imagination all compact.' 

What dulls the sense of all things hastening to 
decay is not wisdom and strength of mind, but routine 
and forgetfulness. From them faith and imagination 
alike awake us. And, what is more, they wake us 
after the same fashion of turning the oblivious round 
into a wonder and an expectation. Not the mere sense 
that 'our moments hasten toward their end,' but the 
vision of time's measureless possibilities makes life 
seem so short. Till we first realise its greatness, we 
cannot fully realise its smallness. In a sense it must be 
long before it is short. What is but ' a vapour which 
appeareth for a little' is, not the life of a gnat, but 
the life of a man, in which the small and great are 
inseparable. 

Poetry says to our hearts, 'Thus passes the glory 
of the world,' by causing us to realise 'what a piece 
of work is man,' how supreme in faculty, how exalted 



o. s. 



15 



226 



THE LENGTH 



in interest, how measureless in possibility, how 
vast in spiritual possessions of truth and beauty, 
and not by turning our thoughts to the 'bubble 
reputation' and the tinsel show of place and posses- 
sion. Similarly religion reveals life's evanescence 
as a moment between eternities by setting eternity 
in man's heart. Only its decisions of infinite moment 
make him realise how fleeting is life's opportunity, 
and its vision of a city which has foundations how 
there is here no certain dwelling-place. 

Thus, for imagination and faith alike, the sense 
that life is 'swifter than a weaver's shuttle' depends 
on seeing the glory of the web it may weave. 
Especially the sense of the shortness of life is not 
religious at all, unless we first realise how long it is, 
measured by the possibilities of good, and still more, 
by the possibilities of choosing wrong and working 
evil. Hence our first religious need is security for its 
length, not its brevity, for achieving its true uses, not 
for meeting even its near and certain end. 

Our first need is Security in View of the 
Length of Life. 

c Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel.' 

The need of such security life and his own foolish 
thoughts about it had taught the Psalmist. He had 
seen the wicked live in arrogance and die at ease, 
and he had suffered and seen others suffer under their 
oppression, till he doubted whether God knew or 
cared, and whether it was not vain to keep the hands 
clean and the heart pure. 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 227 



The old belief that God always gives prosperity 
to the good and overthrows the wicked was, he 
knew, not true, so far at least as this life can show. 
As he believed in another life, we might have 
expected him to turn to the easy solution that 
eternity would redress the unjust balance of time. 
Some have even rested their whole hope of im- 
mortality on this seemingly necessary inference from 
God's righteousness. Yet he did not so much as 
glance at this facile transference of the problem of 
God's rule in an unequal world to an unknown future. 
Nor, what is more, did any prophet. 

For that there are at least two good reasons. 
First, in spite of all the patent injustice of the present, 
the prophet never ceased to seek to see the 'goodness 
of the Lord in the land of the living'; and, second, 
he never ceased to live a life not measured by reward 
either in time or eternity. In short this solution 
was not adequate either to his faith or to his morals. 
Laws enforced by rewards and penalties like a 
criminal code were not for the prophet the thoughts 
of God which are as high above our thoughts as 
the heavens above the earth; nor was doing good 
for the sake even of everlasting happiness what he 
understood by God's righteousness. God's thoughts 
would be like ours in our self-righteous moods, did 
He measure action by rules and its consequences by 
a nice apportionment of pleasure and pain: and, if 
He expected no higher service, the scoff, 'Does Job 
fear God for nought?' would apply to all without 



228 



THE LENGTH 



exception. Other-worldliness may be a more prudent 
foresight, but it has no more purity of motive than 
worldliness. Man is not truly good, if he does good 
not for its own sake, but for ulterior reward : and God 
is not truly good, if He has wholly postponed the 
principles of His government to the world to come. 

When the Psalmist's feet had well nigh slipped 
through suffering himself to be envious at the pros- 
perity of the wicked, he took another way, and set 
himself to a better judgment of the life he knew, and 
not to the application of his old judgment to a life 
still unknown. 

Two things helped him — God's children and 
God's sanctuary. He looked on good men and 
knew that to envy the wicked is to betray the 
cause of the good, for they enjoy a portion they 
would not exchange for any fortune, power or pride 
of place. Then he went into the sanctuary and lifted 
up his heart to God, till the veil was removed 
from his own soul and he saw man's true blessings 
through God's large and gracious purpose. There- 
upon, all his estimates of life's good were changed, 
so that he would not have been one of the ungodly 
to gain the whole world. Then he knew that there 
was no greater need in life than guidance to choose 
none of their ways. 

Thus he made the great discovery that God's 
guidance is not by laws which approve themselves 
by making us prosperous, but by counsel which to 
accept as our own is itself blessedness. 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 229 



Laws are externally imposed, and are obeyed, not 
for their own sake, but for the rewards and punish- 
ments attached to them. As positive precepts, they 
can only insist on obvious duties which can be 
measured by rule; as prohibitions, they cannot go 
beyond definite transgressions and patently unclean 
desires. Laws even of God, though He looks on the 
heart and not the outward appearance, cannot go 
further. But counsel we follow only as we make it our 
own; and we make it our own only as we see it to 
be in accord with the nature of things as they really 
are. Yet it is for us good counsel only as we know 
its wise discernment to be ever beyond us. Thus 
it is at once positive and measureless in all it pro- 
poses to us. Above all, this is true of the counsel 
of God, which we make our own as it becomes our 
own judgment of life, yet causes us humbly to 
realise that life's noblest uses are still beyond our 
highest imagination and aspiration. The moment 
our true guidance ceases to be a Judge's law and 
becomes a Father's counsel, the aims of life at once 
become higher and greater, yet more secure. God's 
counsel standeth forever, because it is in accord with 
the way He has actually made the world and the soul 
of man to use it, and because it embodies a purpose 
we never can exhaust. 

Yet counsel is counsel only when freely given 
and freely received. Hence it is possible to 1 contemn 
the counsel of the Most High,' just because it is 
counsel and not law. But, as it is identical with 



THE LENGTH 



the nature of God's reality, the rejection of it must 
be a greater disaster than the breaking of any law. 
No arbitrarily attached punishment can be so calami- 
tous as to have all God's working necessarily against 
us. To think otherwise is to live in a dream, which 
being based on unreality, will be short, and suddenly 
and terribly broken. 

This may at first look as though the Psalmist, 
when he reached this conclusion, recanted his view 
that the wicked may die without remorse as well as 
live without trouble, and that the righteous may have 
a full cup of bitterness wrung out to them to the very 
dregs of life. But of these happenings his discovery 
altered nothing. Only, seeing them with different 
eyes, he found in them a different meaning. 

Possibly he was thinking specially of Jeremiah, 
the prototype of the Servant of the Lord, a man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief, his message 
despised, his devotion called fanaticism, his sincerity 
rewarded by the stocks and the lash, his devotion 
to his people's good restrained in a dungeon. But, 
though poor, despised, misrepresented, hated, and 
walking daily with his life in his hand, how was 
Jeremiah right when others were wrong, how was 
he loyal when others were false, how was he steadfast 
when others were dismayed, how was he devoted 
when others were self-seeking! What treasures of 
the heart, what peace in the unwavering choice of 
good, what certainty about life's calls, what service 
of a man's noblest hopes, what revelation of God's 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 231 



mind, and of the blessed world when He shall have 
written His counsel on human hearts ! What a con- 
trast in security to strutting on the stage of life, 
dressed in a little brief authority of which death makes 
mockery, and pampering the body which is to feed 
the worms! 

Our second need is Security in View of the 
Brevity of Life. 

c And afterward receive me with glory.' 

It is often said that there is no trace of any hope 
of immortality in the early writings of the Old 
Testament and even that it does not appear at all 
till after the Exile. We must not, however, assume 
that at an earlier date the soul was thought to have 
no continuance, but to suffer dissolution with the 
body. 

The kind of survival now maintained by Spiritual- 
ism has always been held by primitive peoples, and 
the more certainly the more primitive they were. 
In ancient Israel departed souls were thought to go 
down to Sheol, which did not mean the grave, but 
a place in the underworld. There they lived a 
shadowy existence, where they could not praise 
God or behold the inhabitants of the world; yet 
they had knowledge, especially of the future, not 
given to the living, and could return at times to 
communicate it, as Samuel to Saul. There were 
persons who were believed to have familiar spirits 
just like some in our day, and there was a class 
who made a profession of appealing to the dead 



THE LENGTH 



on behalf of the living, who would now be called 
mediums. 

There are people among us who are convinced 
that, if such a type of continuance after death could 
be established, a scientific proof of immortality 
would be provided far more valid than any merely 
spiritual hope, and that anything the spiritual hope 
requires could be added afterwards. 

But history does not seem to approve this expecta- 
tion, for, though this kind of belief has been held 
from time immemorial, no hope of immortality which 
has anything to do with being received with glory 
has ever been built on this foundation. To this day 
it rather appears as if the prophets were right in 
regarding that kind of interest in the dead as 
merely a hindrance in 'seeking unto our God* who 
has appointed our immediate service among the 
living. 

At all events Israel's true hope of immortality 
came in quite another way. It came by the discovery 
of a glory in this life, fleeting as it is, vast enough 
to overflow the bounds of earthly existence, and 
enduring enough to belong not to time but to 
eternity. In short, it came entirely through men 
like Jeremiah who sought nothing whatsoever ex- 
cept to know the counsel of God and to be wholly 
guided by it. They no more lived for eternal reward 
than for temporal. But, as they stood for causes 
which could not perish, were guided by principles 
which could not alter, and saw visions of a Divine 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 233 

purpose which could not fade, it became unthinkable 
that, having so lived in things unseen and eternal, 
they should themselves belong only to things seen 
and temporal. Like all God's best gifts, the hope 
of immortality was not found by seeking it, but it 
came of itself, as our text says, after seeking only to 
follow God's counsel. 'Thou shalt guide me with 
thy counsel and afterward,' and only afterward, 
'receive me with glory.' There is no meaning to 
be attached to any conception of eternal glory 
except as God has guided us on a way which is 
now eternal. Though we may have to walk in it 
with bowed back and bleeding feet, it leads us to the 
mount of vision, where we see, in the humble things 
of His service, a purpose large enough for the uses 
of eternity. Only when we have won them by 
humbly serving them, can we know that the things 
of truth and beauty and goodness are an unfading 
glory, to be believed in and hoped for and loved 
for ever. 

Jesus Christ has for us brought life and im- 
mortality to light in the good-news, in comparison 
with which its manifestation, by Jeremiah or even 
by the whole generation of God's children, is only 
as the shadow to the sunshine. But, when this is 
made an isolated matter of the Resurrection, it is 
no more than the old material basis which had so 
little value; and it runs counter to our Lord's own 
saying that neither would men be persuaded though 
one rose from the dead. The Resurrection is of 



234 



THE LENGTH 



value as it shows that it was not possible that One 
who alone walked perfectly in the whole counsel of 
God should be holden of death. 

The emphasis is always on the Cross, which 
Jesus also conceived as a cup, the full cup into 
which was wrung out all the bitterness of outward 
defeat, scorn, ignominy, agony, death, and the sense 
of being hated of man and even of being forsaken 
of God. But it was also the supreme fulfilment of 
all righteousness, because, in face of every pleasure 
which could bribe or terror which could dismay, 
and against every counsel of fear or prudence, it 
marks an utter trust in the counsel of God for 
guidance in all conceivable circumstances. Not till 
we see in this perfect service the glory of a love 
unconquerable in the power of which we too may 
now live victoriously, can we rest on it a hope for 
another life in the assurance that neither life nor 
death can separate us from the love of God which 
is in Christ Jesus. Nor, without it, can we attach 
any definite meaning to appearing with Him in 
glory. 

We still know not what we shall be, for God 
would not have us be distracted from our tasks in 
this world by the splendour of another, but we know 
that we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as 
He is. When, denying self and taking up our cross 
and following Christ, we are wholly guided by 
God's counsel, we learn that the thoughts of God's 
heart about all He means His children to be and to 



AND BREVITY OF LIFE 235 

achieve are not merely for the few moments of our 
mortal life, but stand to all generations. After we 
thus have the power of an endless life, and only after 
that, can we know, with an assurance never to be 
put to shame, that God will receive us with glory, 
ministering an abundant entrance into the everlasting 
Kingdom of our Lord. As we apply the principles 
of eternity to time, time enlarges for us into the 
promise of eternity. 



XVIII 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

Ezekiel xxiv. 1 6. 'Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the 
desire of thine eyes with a stroke.' 

This title 'Son of man' is given to Ezekiel alone 
among all the prophets. Probably we should have 
judged him the last to deserve it. However much 
more it may mean, it is a poetical and typical way 
of addressing him as man. But it is just the large, 
direct, simple humanity of the other great prophets 
which we seem to miss in him. His views seem at 
times limited and formal, and even his morality legal 
and ceremonial. His passion for justice lacks Micah's 
democratic fire, his opposition to viceHosea's pathos, 
and even his moral indignation comes short of the 
sublime intensity of Amos. He has nothing of Isaiah's 
splendour of thought and utterance; and, compared 
with his contemporary Jeremiah, his insight is less 
inspired, his sympathy less moving, his appeal less 
searching. Had it been our selection, would it not of 
all men have been Jeremiah we should have selected 
as the type of 

The Human with his droppings of warm tears? 
Yet this incident lifts a veil which shows us 
Ezekiel in an unexpected light, revealing an intimacy 
of relation to our common human experience of 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 237 

suffering, not possible even for Jeremiah, who had 
been forbidden to involve himself in social ties. The 
day of disaster found Jeremiah stronger because of 
his solitary state, but it found Ezekiel more deeply 
involved in all his people's sufferings, so that, if 
Jeremiah's were the diviner position, Ezekiel's was 
the more human. 

This story of how Ezekiel had to meet personal 
and public calamity may be taken as covering three 
days, which mark three stages of the transformation 
of human sorrow into faith and peace. 

The first is a day of a sentence of death which 
was far more terrible to him than if it had been 
passed upon himself, and of pleading with his 
people while he stood himself in the shadow of this 
doom. With the tender earnestness and passionate 
insistence of his own impending calamity, he offered 
his hearers, for the last time, the way of penitence 
as an escape from theirs. 

The word of the Lord had come to him saying, 
* Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire 
of thine eyes with a stroke.' With that burden on his 
heart he spoke to the people in the morning, and 
at even his wife died. 

This one poetic word, 'the desire of thine eyes,' 
shows with a flash what fire was in the flint, what 
romance in the outwardly stern and even formal 
man. The true man appears, as when, under the 
cunning and grasping of Jacob which seemed void 
of the possibility of passion, we learn there was a 



238 A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

love for Rachel which made the seven years he served 
for her seem but a few days. 

Ezekiel in public was a mere stern incarnate 
accusing conscience. Before his people and in ful- 
filment of his mission to call men to repentance, 
God had made his 'face hard against their faces 
and as an adamant harder than flint had He made 
his forehead.' Yet while there was in him this side 
'to face the world with,' there was another 'to show 
a woman when he loved her.' When we understand 
this, we read all his life with a difference. We see 
here, too, that God reveals Himself by needing the 
most tender-hearted of his children for His sternest 
tasks, because mere hardness has no edge of steel 
unless it has been tempered in the fire of great 
pity and love. We understand, too, the difficulty 
of his call, how the hand of the Lord had to be 
strong upon him before he could be brought to enter 
upon a life of relentless conflict with imperturbable 
impenitence, and how, when he left his home in 
Palestine to carry his message to the captives in 
Mesopotamia, he went in 'bitterness, in the heat 
of his spirit.' 

There, in face of venomous hatred and in utter 
loneliness, he entered upon those strange, long 
symbolic warnings which made such exhausting 
demands both upon the flesh and upon the spirit. 
But his wife was a true help-mate. Her love found 
some way of making that long hard journey; and 
one day she came to him with the glory of a love- 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 239 

light in her eyes, such as he had never seen even on 
the day of their first espousals. His mission still made 
no progress, his message stirred no less hatred, the 
opposition was no less bitter, but all was changed 
when at home he had the sunshine of perfect sym- 
pathy and perfect understanding. 

Now that dear face was to be hid in 'death's date- 
less night,' and life for him would be almost as dateless 
as death, one long companionless and desolate day, 
without any screen from the keen edged winds of 
man's ingratitude and hate, and with a great empti- 
ness in his heart, which would make all that happened 
to him from without mere things indifferent. 

Yet she had one day still of earthly ministry, and 
surely her greatest. You cannot suppose that such 
a shadow on her beloved's soul could be hidden 
from the keen eyes that had been accustomed to 
read his inmost thoughts; nor can you suppose 
that, when she knew, her thought was for herself. 
No doubt her thought was of the lonely man she 
must leave to travel uncomforted the waste places 
of life, yet not as though, either for her sake or his 
own, she could conceive him neglecting his duty. 
The woman who could be the light of a prophet's 
eyes, must have had something of the immortal 
strain of fire and spirit in her love. Must we not 
conceive her with the quality of John Welsh's 
wife, who could beg on her knees that her husband's 
life might be saved by restoration to his native air, 
but who held out her apron and said, ' I would rather 



2 4 o A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

kep' his head there/ when she heard that the condition 
was that he should recant. 

As unselfishly as Ezekiel himself she must have 
dedicated the last day they would spend together to 
his task, so that he could go forth equipped by her 
sympathy to make his last appeal. 

The shadow both of private and public calamity 
lay black upon his spirit, yet surely God enabled 
him that morning to appeal with more than the old 
intensity and inflexible courage and grave emphasis 
and fearful insistence. There would be also a new 
and trembling passion of tender sympathy and gentle 
patience and personal pity, without which he could 
not have rightly said that God had fully spoken 
through him to the obdurate hearts of his brethren. 
As he realised how the last grains of opportunity 
were running in the glass both for them and for 
him, his face would be no more hard, his brow 
no longer adamant, his message no more a mere 
death-sentence, his audience no more a rebellious 
people. Something of the personal quality of the 
divine omniscience would be granted him, which 
could feel what every soul before him would suffer 
when the sun of hope finally set upon a dying world. 
This would work in his hitherto merely stern message 
such a transformation as when the warm, soft but 
mighty flame breaks out of the hard black coal, 
such a transformation as took place when our Lord 
passed from 'Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites, ' to 'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. . .Behold, 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 241 



your house is left unto you desolate.' Men would 
hear in it a new and more appealing note, a note 
perhaps only to be rightly struck by those who stand 
in the shadow both of personal sorrow and public 
calamity. 

That was the task of the morning. The afternoon 
God would give him, from regard to his human 
affection. No doubt he told his wife what he had 
done, and received a smile of approval which assured 
him that their duty and affection would be eternally 
intertwined. 

And then those dear eyes never shone upon him 
again on earth. With the gathering shadows of evening 
the stroke fell. Prepare for it as we may, we never 
realise what a stroke is till it does fall. No certainty 
of approaching bereavement ever quite prepares the 
heart for the blankness of the vacant place, for the 
cold, dreary emptiness of the world, for the poor, dazed 
groping of the dismayed heart. In the long hours of 
that solitary night Ezekiel drained his cup of sorrow, 
realising, in all its vivid reality, how his house was 
left to him desolate, and that desolate his heart 
would be all the days which remained of his earthly 
pilgrimage. 

The second day had an even harder task in store 
for him, a task to which his night's experience had 
given individual, personal, appalling meaning. It 
was a task to swallow up the thought of his great 
personal loss; or, if he could not but think of it, to 
reconcile him to it. Though never in his life, hard 

o. s. 16 



2 4 2 A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

as it had been, had he stood so much in need of 
sympathy and comfort, he knew that the work before 
him needed a lonely spirit, and that it was of God's 
great mercy that the tender heart of a woman had 
been spared the agony of such a day. 

' And I did in the morning,' he says, 'as I was 
commanded.' In his gay clothes, dry-eyed, without 
token or sign of grief, he went and stood in the 
public way. God did not ask him to volunteer his 
message. That would have been too terrible. He 
must wait till a scandalised public demanded the 
meaning of his unseemly conduct. Then he was to 
tell a story which would freeze the warm blood in 
the heart. 

Jerusalem was about to fall, and everything they 
honoured and everyone they loved to go down in 
the ruin. God would profane His sanctuary, the ex- 
cellency of His people's strength, the desire of their 
eyes; and in the slaughter their sons and daughters 
would perish. Nothing would remain of the worship 
and the homes, the hope of returning to which had 
alone sustained their hearts all the days of their exile 
in that alien and inhospitable land. When all alike 
are desolate and hopeless, mourning is choked in the 
utterance, and all symbols of grief become mockery. 
Heedless of outward forms, dry-eyed, and with mere 
moaning toward one another, as all the expression 
they could compass, they would pine away in their 
sin-stricken souls. 

It was an appalling judgment, and, in other days, 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 243 



it would have been delivered with appalling sternness. 
But on this day Ezekiel in his bereavement, his tender- 
ness, his resignation, his humble sincerity, was a 
sign to that stricken people of another quality. Death 
and desolation were to him no longer mere well- 
deserved judgments of a righteous God. But, his 
indignation being softened to pity, he knew it as 
the agony of individual souls, the greater that they 
were weak and sinful. This compassion taught men, 
as condemnation had never done, that only in loving- 
kindness does God appoint sorrow to follow sin, and 
thereby softened them to penitence and encouraged 
them to hope. 

To-day still there are among us men and women 
like Ezekiel from whom God has removed the light 
of their eyes with a stroke, who go out in the 
morning and wait at their old places, sad-eyed and 
patient, for us to ask what it means. And when we 
ask, they say to us the same things. The light of 
our eyes shall be taken away and our homes desolate 
and what we hold sacred profaned and our posses- 
sions turned to ashes and the things in which we 
trusted crumbled to dust. Then we shall have lost 
in time what we might have won for eternity, if 
for love we chose lust, for duty pleasure, for goodness 
gain, for God the fashion of this world that passes 
away. They speak no longer in mere judgment, as 
if sin were gain could we only escape punishment, 
but in understanding and compassion and tender 
pity for our waste of life's most precious gifts and 



16 — 2 



244 A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

our desolating neglect of life's great opportunity. 
Such individual discernment and fellow-feeling few 
possess without experience of sorrow as well as of 
conflict. But, without it, no one can reveal to another 
the true disaster of sin or touch the heart to real 
penitence. 

Yet not till the third day did the true meaning 
of his experience clearly dawn upon the prophet. 
Hitherto he had seen no fruit of all his labours. 
Whether men heard or whether they forbore, he 
had faithfully delivered God's warning; and, at 
least till he spoke out of his own sorrow, they would 
not hearken. But as he watched beside his dead, 
bitterness passed from him, the heat of his spirit 
died down, and rebellion was turned to gratitude 
that his beloved was delivered from the day of evil. 
Yet he still felt in his desolation the hand of the 
Lord heavy upon him. But as he sat alone through 
the dark watches of another night, God gave back 
to him, purified and made perfect, all he had lost. 

Other earthly things might be dust, but he now 
knew that a partnership, fashioned by the spirit of 
duty in the fire of love, death cannot dissolve; and 
what is stronger than death he knew could only be 
of God. There was no blundering with our human 
affections. Had not God Himself called his wife, 
'the light of his eyes'? God had taken nothing 
without knowing the cost. Then Ezekiel knew, in 
a sense he never knew before, that God is the Lord, 
the Lord even of these appalling disasters, the Lord 



A MINISTRY OF SORROW 245 

of life and death no doubt, but with love, and not 
merely judgment, controlling all destinies. 

That God wills not the death of the sinner but 
would rather men came to Him and lived, he had 
always known and declared. But now something 
came home to him of the supreme revelation that a 
merciful wisdom works in all events — and not least 
in the most terrible — seeking and saving the lost. 

In the day when God took away the desires of men's 
eyes and all whereon they set their hearts — strength, 
renown, possession, kindred, when all others were 
dumb, his mouth would be opened, and he would be 
a sign, not only of holy living and meek resignation, 
but of confident hope that God is Lord over this and 
all events for the ends of a love which could never 
leave us in sin, but also could never leave us in 
despair. 

For each o'ne of us too, in days of sorrow and be- 
reavement, there is consolation in that Divine word, 
'The light of thine eyes.' There is no endearing name 
we can bestow upon our kindred and our friends but 
God also calls them by, and there is no bereavement 
without His knowing all it means to us of empty 
homes and desolate hearts. 

In God's sight even the vastest upheavals are 
no mere deciding of the destiny of nations, hut 
His measure, as ours ought to be, ay, and His 
meaning, as ours ought to be, is concerned with the 
agony of human hearts. This is the real scorching fire 
of the discipline. But it is also the true hope of 



246 A MINISTRY OF SORROW 

purification and peace. Only as that human experience 
concerns us and we see in it matters of eternal moment, 
and realise that the external things whereon men set 
their hearts are, in any case, dust and ashes, can our 
mouths be opened to make men know that God is 
still the Lord, with all destinies in His hand, and 
that He determines all events for His one supreme 
treasure upon earth — the soul of man that lives by 
duty and by love. For it still the Lord God Omni- 
potent reigneth. 



XIX 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 

Acts xiv. 19. 'And having persuaded the crowds, these stoned Paul, and 
dragged him out of the city, thinking him to be dead.' 

In the course of his hazardous life Paul suffered 
many persecutions, yet this stoning at Lystra stands 
out by itself. No other left him as dead, and it 
would appear that he suffered from it permanent 
bodily injury. But the deep impression it left on 
his mind was due still more to the experiences which 
followed it and their effect upon the whole course of 
his ministry. 

This we gather chiefly from the Epistle to the 
Galatians. Our right to use that Epistle in this 
connection depends on the view that it was written 
to the group of churches in which Lystra was in- 
cluded. This, I admit, is still questioned by good 
authorities, but not, I think, for good reasons. In 
any case, my interpretation of the incident depends 
on regarding 'the former visit 7 when he preached 
'because of an infirmity of the flesh,' which is men- 
tioned in Galatians, as taking place on the return 
journey from Derbe to Antioch after this persecution, 
the 'former' distinguishing it from the 'first* on the 
journey forward. 

That the infirmity was not disease, but permenent 



248 STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



injuries from persecution, appears from the descrip- 
tion of it as the stigmata or owner's marks of the 
Lord Jesus. The natural interpretation is that the 
suffering and weakness, which followed the assault, 
forced Paul and his companions to alter their plan 
and return by the way they came. The former visit, 
when he preached through infirmity, would then be 
intentionally distinguished from the first visit when 
he appeared in the fullness of his vigour. 

When he says, some years after, that he still 
bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus, he 
must have meant that his injuries were both grave 
and permanent, but, unless he had regarded them 
as also having wrought some deep and lasting 
spiritual change, he would not have referred them 
so solemnly to the Lord Jesus. That spiritual change 
may be summed up in his own words. He learned 
that when he was weak, then he was strong. It was 
one experience, but his whole later experience was 
determined by three particular applications of it — 
the first was to himself, the second to his method, 
and the third to his gospel. These are the matters 
of chief importance for us; and we shall consider 
them in this order. 

In the first place, then, it revealed to Paul his 
True Self. 

A mechanical idea of inspiration causing them 
to read his Epistles, which are intimate personal 
letters, as doctrinal treatises dictated to him from 
above, has, for many, utterly obscured the humanity 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 249 



of the Apostle. All know his struggles with others, but 
few discern the intensity of his struggle with himself. 

Were he still alive, he might startle his readers, 
as he did the idolaters at Lystra, by springing forth 
among them and rending his garments and declaring 
himself a man of like passions with themselves. 
He never found the higher faith bring the higher 
life without struggle and conflict. To the end he 
did not regard himself as having attained the goal 
he strove for; and neither nature nor grace ever set 
him above temptation or above mistake. 

In Paul, as in us, there were two men. And, like 
us too, he sometimes failed to distinguish them. The 
natural man had great qualities ; and, as he speaks of 
being consecrated to his task from his mother's womb, 
he manifestly did not regard them as merely evil. He 
was a man of warm affections and possibly of quick 
temper. Intellectually he loved subtleties and excelled 
in debate. He set aside the wisdom of words, but as 
one who had known its temptation. On occasion he 
could use the glittering weapon of rhetoric; and he 
had a subtle understanding of what was persuasive 
to his audience. A difficult problem always awoke his 
interest; and he was easy to draw into the mazes 
of theology. He was a born pioneer; and he was 
ambitious to succeed in what he undertook. Almost 
the only tradition of him which may be authentic 
speaks of his personal magnetism over all he met, 
in striking contrast to the first effect of his personal 
appearance. Even from Acts we gather the impression 



2 so STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



of a man who never failed to rouse violent opposition 
where he failed to win the most devoted friendship ; 
and the frequency with which he wrought mighty- 
works, that is, miraculous cures, itself proves a domi- 
nating influence upon the minds of men. Finally, he 
was capable of embracing the whole civilised world in 
his purpose, and of forming a great and consistent 
plan for carrying it into effect. 

If you read the account of his work and his 
speeches, you will see that, up to this point, this 
was the man who was constantly in evidence. He 
is the chief speaker, and his speeches are mainly 
debate, though at times, as in his appeal to the 
idolators, he could rise to noble heights of eloquence. 
His fearless personality never failed to impress, 
if only to opposition, and his direct influence upon 
certain minds had sometimes the most amazing effect. 
His speech and bearing and working made men think 
him and Barnabas gods, which at least speaks of an 
extraordinary quality and power. 

Men saw a brilliant and successful leader of a 
new movement, but the new man in Christ Jesus, 
to whom all things had become new by a great 
gentleness and patience and loving-kindness, was 
obscured to the world, and even to his disciples, 
and perhaps even to himself. The vehemence of his 
protest, when he was mistaken for a god, may speak 
of a commotion in his own soul, caused by a glimpse 
into the abyss of his own thoughts, as well as by 
reprobation of the idolatry. 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 251 

The next day taught him the worthlessness of 
this domination. The man who yesterday was hailed 
as a god, was to-day stoned like a dog and flung 
outside the city wall like dead carrion. He came 
back to consciousness, but it was to the consciousness 
of being a different person. The broken man who 
was helped away was no longer one who loved the 
arena, overwhelmed in debate, bore down opposi- 
tion by his moral vehemence, and dominated by his 
spiritual energy. No wonder that he feared the effect 
upon his converts, and dreaded to be despised and 
rejected. 

But a new man appeared who was a new mani- 
festation of Christ, whom his converts received, not, 
according to his fears, as a pretender circumstances 
had unmasked, but as a messenger of God, even as 
Jesus Himself. 

That was the heart of the whole matter. The 
Galatians saw Christ in him; they learned, as no 
eloquence or miracle could teach them, what it 
meant to be a Christian. They learned that true 
strength and victory was of gentleness and patience, 
and they discerned a spirit, which, by turning evil 
to good, was more than conqueror over all earthly 
ills. They saw, in short, the man for whom eloquence 
was sounding brass, and prophecy and miracles and 
martyrdom profitless without love. And, as this won 
all hearts, he had surely a right to glory in his 
afflictions. 

Paul's experience is not very different from hu- 



252 STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



man experience generally. The more obstreperous 
the applause, the more suddenly it can turn into 
hissing and fury. It is the destiny of all human 
idols one day to be flung out as dead. And, even 
in our quiet places and among our friends, we are 
successful to-day and fail to-morrow, are full of 
health and energy to-day and broken men tottering 
to the grave to-morrow. Our lease is at will, and 
the strongest of us cannot contest its terms ; and so 
many hold it with such disabilities that it seems 
scarce worth retaining. Shattered frames, frustrated 
hopes, broken minds, desolate hearts require some 
great good to justify life. But, if we know our 
souls to be our true good, we have discovered what 
is worth the price. Our deeper, tenderer, humbler, 
truer selves too often become encrusted with vanity 
and domineering and love of possession and place 
when we have nothing but health and success and 
ease and approbation. God, in His goodness may 
have to recall us to our true selves by disease and 
pain and disaster and bereavement, and not realise 
for us our earthly desires in a way to make lean our 
souls. 

If any object has commanded the reverence of 
our generation it is efficiency, the efficiency of 
health, vigour, mental resource, confidence, organis- 
ing talent, commanding influence which commands 
success. But is there not a deeper, more lasting 
efficiency, with power over the hearts and not merely 
the bodies of men, having in it the might to make 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 253 



all things new, only to be won by the weakness 
which reveals to us a strength not to be crushed 
by all the brute forces of the world? Is not the 
truly efficient person, in the end, the new man 
in Christ Jesus, pitiful and gentle and kind, who 
knows how to bear all things, believe all things, 
hope all things, endure all things, and who thereby 
turns evil into good, and defeat into victory, and all 
the uncertainties of life into the unchanging purpose 
of God? 

In the second place, it revealed to Paul his 
True Method. 

We have already seen something of his original 
method. If we look at the narrative a little more 
closely, we also see the plan on which he meant to 
carry it through. The mission had begun in Cyprus, 
the native country of Barnabas. From the direction 
of their journey, it was apparently meant to end in 
Cilicia, the native country of Paul. It was characteristic 
of their courage, or rather of their faith, thus to face 
first those who knew them best. 

At Lystra Cilicia was not far away, but the journey 
through the mountains was impossible for a broken 
man. One cannot be stoned by an infuriated mob 
and flung out as dead without serious injuries. 
Paul does not say much about them, but what he 
says is full of meaning. His converts, he declares, 
would have been ready to pluck out their eyes and 
give them to him. The inference is that he was 
subject to at least attacks of blindness. He further 



254 STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



describes his infirmity as of a nature his converts 
might have been tempted to despise or spit out. 
That seems to indicate attacks of an epileptic type, 
it being an ancient custom to spit as a means of 
averting from the spectator the evil spirit which was 
thought to cause them. Such blinding attacks could 
easily be caused by a lesion which made him at 
first seem to be dead. As such fits are often accom- 
panied by violent pain, they may also have been 
what Paul afterwards described as his * stake in 
the flesh.' 

The Paul who returned was in no danger of being 
mistaken for a god. There could be no more debates 
in the synagogues, no more eloquent appeals, no 
more publicity of any kind. Between the times 
Paul spent in pain and Barnabas in care of him, 
they devoted themselves privately to their converts. 
We read that they confirmed the souls of the 
brethren, exhorted them to continue in the faith, 
appointed elders in every church, and prayed with 
fasting, commending them to the Lord on whom 
they had believed. But, then, for the first time, we 
also read, they made many disciples and could 
begin to speak of the conversion of the Gentiles. 
This was the triumph of a new method, more 
quiet, more personal, more simply religious. 

Paul, it is true, did not abandon the old, when 
he found it useful. He could still argue, when 
argument was called for; he could still stir up a 
whole city by his appeals, when commotion was 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 255 



necessary; he was not afraid to exhort, publicly as 
well as privately, even so seemingly hopeless a subject 
as a corrupt Roman Governor; he could employ the 
arts of appeal, even in face of the conceit of wisdom 
of an Athenian audience. Nor did he ever try with- 
out putting all his mind and heart into the task. He 
never accepted failure, if, by any skill or earnestness, 
he could succeed, 

But it was perhaps in those days when he bore so 
painfully in his body what he calls the owner's marks 
of the Lord Jesus, that he formed the habit of mind, 
which made him afterwards so constantly describe 
himself as the slave of Jesus Christ, and consider 
himself every other person's slave for His sake. 
And a like effect of his weakness appeared in his new 
method. 

In intimate intercourse, in the exchange of hopes 
and fears, in the quiet influence of faith upon faith 
and character upon character, in fellowship and 
united prayer, in discovering those who could guide 
and teach and create a spirit of mutual trust and 
helpfulness, in forming small societies to be a leaven 
of the Kingdom of God in the great world of 
heathenism, he found the true method of service 
into which he was henceforth to pour the whole 
wealth of his nature. It was a lowly service com- 
pared with the enticing words of man's wisdom, 
but it approved itself in demonstration of the spirit 
and of power. 

If the call should come to us, we too may not 



256 STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



shrink from the way of argument and public appeal 
and affirmation of our convictions, but must follow 
it with such courage and success as our faith and 
spiritual power make possible for us. We too must 
face the charge of being among those who turn the 
world upside down, should our day demand that of 
us. And we must go forward with a high heart, putting 
all our loyalty, all our skill, all our resources into the 
task. Especially we must stake all our faith, not only 
in God, but, through God, in man. In the worst there 
are elements of the best. In the spiritual sphere there 
is nothing impossible. As each one is a child of 
God, on behalf of truth and righteousness and the 
beauty of holiness the last word is neither with us nor 
with him, but with God. 

Yet our true hope of amending the world is in 
another method, the method of being the servant 
of Christ in the service of all men. 

In these noisy days we are not learning it well; 
and, in consequence, we are merely dismayed when 
argument and oratory and well engineered plans 
and vast organised efforts turn out futilities. The 
public doings, in which we trusted, are cast out as 
dead, and we are slow to perceive that a humbler 
but greater power may rise in their stead. Nor will 
anything really transforming happen till we win 
our strength out of weakness, finding it simply in 
living humbly and hopefully among our fellowmen, 
so that they cannot doubt that we are messengers 
of God, or fail to see in us Jesus Christ. Then we 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 257 



shall know that there is no higher or mightier way 
than to have prayer and fellowship in Christ's name, 
to seek our natural leaders among those who are 
inspired by His spirit, and to live humbly for the 
service of others in His power. 

There is an Indian doctrine called yoga which 
means that no one can really teach another person 
religion. All he can do is to live his own religion, 
when, in fellowship with him, other people will 
discover their own religion. Of no religion is this 
truer than the faith of Christ. We come to Him, 
not as we are taught of man, but only as we are 
taught of God. Yet we receive Christ by receiving 
His brethren, and men can discover Him for them- 
selves only as they see Him in those who are like 
Him. The greatest work for Christ, therefore, is 
neither what we say nor what we do, but simply what 
we are. 

In the third place, it revealed to Paul his 
True Gospel. 

The new man is himself the true method, and 
the new method is itself the true gospel. The essence 
of it is that, when we are weak in ourselves, then 
are we strong in God, that, when we discover the 
worthlessness of the world for our own dominion, we 
discover its value for God's Kingdom. 

Even in his most argumentative speeches Paul 
aimed at true faith and never at mere intellectual 
refutation. But his earlier speeches could at the 
most have produced intellectual conviction. They 



o. s. 



17 



258 STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 

tended to increase the danger of Christianity becom- 
ing merely one of the many movements of thought 
which, at that time, were causing great commotion, 
but effecting little spiritual change. 

Even when Paul spoke of the Crucifixion, men 
would not necessarily discern that it was a new 
view of God and of life and of the true uses of the 
world. They could still have thought of it as a mere 
momentary triumph of wickedness in the midst of 
a revelation of might and glory, with its meaning 
the assurance that such moments do not last for ever. 

But, in his suffering and weakness, Paul struck 
a deeper note. The faith in which his disciples were 
exhorted to continue could no longer be mistaken 
for faith in a glorious triumph of Divine power, 
but was now, beyond all possibility of misunder- 
standing, faith in a Kingdom only to be entered 
through much tribulation. 

No doubt he was first thinking of persecutions. 
He had seen that there was nothing worth main- 
taining in the world which the world would not 
condemn. And were we truer to our highest insight 
and noblest convictions, we also would learn the 
same truth through experience of opposition. Did 
we commend ourselves more unmistakably to men's 
consciences, we should more certainly disturb their 
conventions and be more in conflict with their 
prejudices and desires. We find life easy and 
unopposed only because we obscure some of our 
principles and compromise with others. 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 259 

But in the days when Paul's plan had been set 
aside and his activities restricted, when he did 
nothing without pain and was much driven in 
upon himself, tribulation came to have a wider 
meaning and taking up his cross a deeper significance. 
He learned that no eternal good can. be won out of 
ease of mind and comfort of body and the world's 
successes and gratifications, and that we find our 
best only when we go a lonely, difficult way in search 
of it, and seldom discover God's purpose till our 
own is frustrated. Then he knew that the Cross of 
Christ is the eternal meaning of a Kingdom which 
is a righteousness that is not mere well-doing, a 
peace that is not mere ease, a joy that is not mere 
fleeting pleasure. 

Though the world is only for the manifestation 
of God's Kingdom, His Kingdom is not of this 
world. Hence it is in the nature of things, and not 
merely by arbitrary Divine appointment, that, to 
have eternal gain, we must suffer temporal loss. 
To save us from making this present fleeting world 
our kingdom, we must suffer disappointment with 
it at every turn. As the true purpose and blessedness 
even of this world lie beyond it, we may never hope 
to find them in it. Wherefore the Cross of Christ 
is not a mere incident in history, but is the eternal 
way of every victory in which the spirit triumphs 
over the flesh. 

In these days of concentrated interest in the 
kingdoms of this world, our vision of that kingdom 

17 — 2 



26o STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 



of the spirit has not been growing clearer. Yet, if 
we did not see it in the storm of battle, it was because 
we had already lost it in the sunshine of prosperity. 
That men should make any sacrifice for the things 
of the spirit was almost beginning to be thought 
unnecessary and even incredible. Material success 
was regarded as ample justification of all ways of 
living. That our best success might require material 
failure would have seemed mere preposterous folly. 

When we have had time rightly to feel our losses, 
we may better discern our gains. The immediate 
call is for our own learning, as we behold the wreck 
of vast schemes of ambition, the fields of the slain, 
the worthlessness of human trusts, the destruction 
of cherished possessions, and look forward to a 
disturbed and impoverished age. Unless we have 
a Gospel which can accept tribulation and find it 
the way into an everlasting kingdom, in what have 
we hope? 

Yet to what are we turning? For the moment 
at least more than ever to pleasure and gain, and 
place and power. 

The realities of life, however, do not change. 
The Cross of Christ is still their sole interpretation. 
We truly gain the world only as, through it, the 
world is crucified to us and we to the world. The 
price of the highest must be paid, and it is opposition, 
and condemnation, and poor success, and stress of 
thought and aspiration, and inward conflict, and 
the patience of faith and the service of love. 



STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS 261 

We have no need to seek trials of our own making, 
we have no right to fail in any enterprise through our 
own discouragement or slackness, but we may not 
escape trial by taking an easy road or secure success 
by aiming low. The difficult road and the high aim 
alone lead into the Kingdom, and, as none of its 
good is in this world, the fashion and lust of which 
pass away, we can be strong only by what teaches 
us our own weakness, and we may best succeed 
by what is for our own purposes failure and disaster. 



XX 



THE FELLOWSHIP AND THE GOSPEL 

Philippians i. 3, 5. 'I thank my God with joy... for your fellowship 
in furtherance of the gospel.' 

Our watch- words for furthering any cause are 
'enthusiasm' and 'organisation'; Paul's are 'joy' 
and 'fellowship.' In this difference lies the secret 
both of his own amazing devotion to the Gospel and 
of his faith in these poor, ignorant, imperfect fellow- 
workers of his as the adequate means for furthering 
it. To the great organised religions around, religions 
sanctioned by immemorial custom, housed in vast 
temples and embodied in impressive rites, with the 
power of a state behind them to fall back upon which 
was universal, strong and ruthless, these Christian 
fellowships were foolish, weak, base, despised, nay, 
did not exist at all. Yet Paul believed them able to 
bring to naught even those things which so confidently 
and mightily were. 

Only because he trusted a quite different order of 
power was such confidence possible. Christianity 
was of less account than any other religion of the 
time either for stirring up enthusiasm to a passion 
or for showing an imposing front. But its followers 
had in them the breath of life, without which the 
mightiest institutions decay. Paul speaks of it as 



THE FELLOWSHIP 263 



wisdom and righteousness and sanctiflcation and 
redemption. Those who possess it are saints, holy 
and beloved, heirs of God and joint-heirs, not with 
himself alone, but with Jesus Christ. Their gather- 
ings represent God's Kingdom upon earth, because 
each may be filled with knowledge of His will. 

The frequency with which he must correct the 
crudeness of their spiritual ideas and expose the 
stains upon their moral purity might give the impres- 
sion of exaltation and unreality to his words, were 
it not that all his relations with them are on this 
high plane, so that he never tries to correct an 
error except by their own discernment of the 
highest or remove an evil except by appeal to their 
own loyalty to the noblest. Though he had no 
illusions either about their ignorance or their 
weakness, nothing they ever thought or did shook 
his confidence of something there in the hearts 
of these people of joyful possession of God's truth 
to which appeal could be made, and of power 
whereby the victory which alone is truly moral, 
the triumph of one's own soul over evil, could be 
won. 

More especially Paul was confident that this 
common possession of God's good-news now, with 
its gift of peace and hope, and its promise of a new 
humanity in a new earth and a new heaven in the 
years to come, was itself sufficient to give them the 
closest unity, which he calls fellowship. Nor is 
anything in his life more deserving of note than 



264 THE FELLOWSHIP 



the absence of every effort to promote co-operation 
except by awaking this sense of joy in possessing 
a common good. 

The very idea of fellowship is inward spiritual 
relation: and with this meaning the word is used 
in the New Testament with a frequency and an 
almost technical precision which the English transla- 
tion only imperfectly conveys. Partly, the word 
fellowship has come in our language to mean little 
more than association; and, partly, the translators, 
influenced by this fact, substituted communion in 
what they regarded as more solemn connections. 
But fellowship in the Early Church was always 
in the most solemn connection. It expressed the 
essential Christian relation to each other. To con- 
tinue in the fellowship was the mark of a true 
believer, and the chief rite, the breaking of bread, 
was its seal and manifestation. This was so among 
themselves, moreover, because fellowship was also 
the essential relation of God's reconciled children 
to Himself, the 'fellowship of the Spirit' being 
their central religious experience. On this relation, 
which had been produced and maintained by the 
Gospel, Paul placed all his hopes for furthering the 
Gospel. 

The effect even of an intense belief is not always 
either direct or simple, but it almost always involves 
disbelief in something else. When you believe 
yourself well and vigorous by reason of your own 
constitution, you do not seek the same result by 



AND THE GOSPEL 265 



medicine; when you believe that the rain will 
abundantly water your field, you do not build 
irrigation dams; when you think a truth is abundantly 
proved by reason, you do not enforce it by law and 
penalties; when you believe men are taught of God, 
you do not wish to regulate their faith and actions 
by what you think proper. After this fashion Paul 
proved his faith in the Christian fellowship. He 
committed his trust to it so utterly that he took 
no account of the usual safeguards of organised 
societies. 

His first conviction concerned fellowship in the 
truth. All he said and did and, still more, all he 
left unsaid and undone, in his relations with these 
humble believers shows how sure was his con- 
viction that they had each of them seen for them- 
selves the same truth, and must, therefore, be one 
in faith. 

Converts from heathenism in Paul's time were 
just like converts from heathenism in our time. 
They only imperfectly cast off their old views, and 
the deepest things of the Christian faith they only 
imperfectly understood. And they had fewer means 
to help them. The Gentile believers had no sacred 
writing. The Hebrew had the Old Testament, but 
they had been trained to read it with rabbinical 
spectacles. Of the New Testament only a few of 
the epistles had been written; and they were still 
read merely as private letters. The only source of 
instruction was the preaching and conversation of 



266 THE FELLOWSHIP 



occasional itinerant teachers, which must have been 
central but could not have been systematic. There 
was no form of creed. What we call the Apostles* 
Creed was not in its first form really a creed, and 
no Apostle had anything to do with it. Why for 
these small communities, brought up in paganism 
and still living in an atmosphere of pagan thinking, 
were not effective outward helps devised for their 
better instruction in the truth of Christianity? 

We can imagine the other Apostles continuing as 
simple evangelists, merely because they failed to 
realise the need, but that is an explanation impossible 
in the case of the theological and organising mind 
of Paul. If he abstained, it must have been from 
the sense of having a better method at his disposal. 

What he did rely on his writings make evident. 
His whole appeal was to a truth his readers had 
seen in Jesus Christ for themselves, which they 
knew to be of God and not man because it had 
delivered their souls from superstitions and fears, 
and set them free in peace and joy, and delivered 
them from the might of evil, and made the world 
for them a new creation. To awaking in them an 
understanding of the full meaning and power of 
what was already theirs, Paul, therefore, devoted 
all his powers of persuasion, and he did not dream 
of imposing it upon them from without by any 
creed or formula. Instead he urges them to exercise 
the discernment of spiritual men who can judge 
all things aright just because they have a truth 



AND THE GOSPEL 267 



which delivers them from dependence on any human 
opinion. 

This was very far from assuring the absence of 
all difference of view. There were differences which 
even threatened division, and which grieved him to 
the heart. But he never sought to overcome them by 
laying down forms upon which to agree. He merely 
pointed anew to Jesus Christ, as though no return 
to unity were of any value which was not a common 
vision of the same reality. 

Nor was that all. The one certain development 
in his mind was an increasing toleration regarding 
individual and even national differences in con- 
ceiving every form of truth. To the Galatians he 
said, 'If ye are circumcised, Christ profiteth you 
nothing/ To the Corinthians, a little later, he could 
say, 'If any man is circumcised, let him not be 
uncircumcised.' In this epistle to the Philippians, 
after a few years more, he still urges his readers 
to be of one mind, but, while he would be glad 
to have them agreed on one view, he lays all the 
stress on being of kindred soul. Even on a vital 
issue of what might seem plain ethical moment, he 
is prepared to wait for agreement till it come of 
God's own revealing. Upon this truth of God's 
own revealing and man's own seeing he placed all 
his faith for the furthering of the good-news; and 
he gave thanks for it with joy, just because he 
knew that no difference arising from human limita- 
tion or imperfection in conceiving it could ever 



268 THE FELLOWSHIP 



deny the essential unity of those who possessed it, 
or hinder God in revealing His own mind to them 
in ever fuller, and, therefore, more perfectly uniting 
measure. 

If unity in truth, because all its members see the 
same reality of God's own manifesting, is the tap-root 
of fellowship, which gives it strength and stability, the 
fibres which nourish it and keep it ever green are 
the loyalties and sympathies and forbearances which 
come from what the Apostle describes as having the 
same love, and being of united soul. He finds no 
figure interdependent enough to express the closeness 
of this relation except the members of one body: nor 
is any figure living and close enough for what 
maintains it except that the head of every one is 
Christ. 

When we are tempted to think his language too 
exalted for human nature, we should recall how this 
spirit manifested itself in the days before Christ's reve- 
lation of the Father had been enfeebled by admixture 
with the spirit of the world. For a time it obliterated 
all sense of private property, and later Paul was able 
to speak of the help given to the poorer brethren at 
Jerusalem, not as 'liberality,' as it is translated, but as 
'the expression of fellowship.' 

A power which could break down what the 
Apostle calls 'the middle- wall of partition,' the 
alienation, in the name of religion, between Jew 
and Greek, might justify the utmost exaltation of 
language. But still greater was the transformation 



AND THE GOSPEL 269 



of human relations by the Gospel which made Mary 
the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene sisters, 
Simon the zealot and Matthew the publican fellow- 
apostles, Paul the learned Jewish rabbi and Onesimus 
the runaway Gentile slave father and son. Was it 
not good ground for believing that a power from 
God Himself had come into the world equal to the 
task both of regenerating our present society and of 
assuring the promise of a greater heavenly society 
beyond it? 

Like everything else on earth, it had its conflict 
with the divisive forces of human nature and human 
society. Nor were any of them absent from these 
Christian communities. Our distinctions — rank, 
possession, reputation, education — were there, and, 
in addition, distance was less easily bridged, lan- 
guages were less easily translated, and religion still 
more openly reinforced national hatreds. Occasional 
grave failures the Apostle makes no attempt to 
conceal. More especially it appeared in misuse of 
the ordinance which was the very symbol and bond 
of brotherhood. Though the essence of the Lord's 
Supper was to be one bread, one body, it was made 
the occasion for displaying abundance and forgetting 
need. Some were drunken and others hungry: and 
it is characteristic of Paul's judgment that he seems 
to have felt the hunger, even more than the drunken- 
ness, to be a denial of all the ordinance signified. 

But most to be noted is his indifference to the 
abuses, and his concentration upon the absence of 



270 THE FELLOWSHIP 



the spirit of brotherhood which should have pre- 
vented them. Nothing could have been easier than 
to lay down a form of observance which would 
at once have removed all unseemliness. But he 
knew that, in spite of every pagan element which 
survived, there was in the heart of these people a 
spirit whereby a unity far greater in itself and far 
mightier in furthering the Gospel of love could be 
realised than was possible for the best outward 
ordering. Believing it, moreover, to be, not of 
man's organising, but of God's implanting, he did 
nothing whatsoever except appeal to it. For one 
who had lifted up his heart to God in joy and 
gratitude for the bond of the spirit of Jesus and the 
love of the Father with His brethren, mere ruling 
out differences and imposing uniform names and 
arranging visible bonds could only seem a human, 
temporary and imperfect way of uniting God's 
children. 

Many would have said, How do all these visible 
abuses hinder the Gospel ! and have set themselves, 
by every means at their disposal, to suppress them. 
But the Apostle knew that the only real hindrance 
to the Gospel was the absence of the spirit of the 
Gospel, and, therefore, he gave all his strength to 
awaking it. In one word his faith was in fellowship, 
not organisation: and a fellowship is distinguished 
from an organisation by being dependent, not upon 
visible uniformities, but upon a spirit of under- 
standing, sympathy, patience and personal affec- 



AND THE GOSPEL 271 



tion, in which men are not alienated because they 
differ. 

Finally, something more is necessary for growth 
than tap-root and fibres. They produce nothing 
without the coming of the spring. But the Gospel 
was for the Apostle just the call of the spring, the 
rising of the sun above the storms and clouds of 
earth, which makes each one who lives under its 
influence, in his own way, put forth the special 
vital forces which God has implanted in him, so 
that the earth clothes itself in verdure and becomes 
a harmony of varied and abundant promise. 

The Gospel concerned nothing less than the 
Rule of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, a Rule by Christ's method and for the ends 
He manifested. The Gospel to be furthered was this 
good-news of the Kingdom: and the fellowship 
furthered it by being a colony, an outpost of it in 
the world. All its members were one in this service, 
not by visible arrangement, but by being, in the 
inmost loyalty of their hearts, citizens of it. 

At first sight this faith in the Kingdom of the 
Father might seem less prominent in the teaching 
of the Apostle than in the teaching of his Master. 
But when he speaks of being 'in Christ' he means 
being in the world in which Christ lived, the world 
where, being reconciled to the Father, we find His 
will the purpose of goodness for which all things 
work and by which all experience is re-created for 
us by love and wisdom, in a world of new men and 



272 THE FELLOWSHIP 



new values, and therefore of new securities both for 
time and eternity. 

But the highest evidence of his faith in this 
Kingdom of God is his way of treating even the 
most imperfect believers as citizens of it. He has 
often to warn them even against gross sins, but he 
carefully refrains from anything like legal prohibi- 
tions. He has to reprove division, but he never 
urges agreement by concession and compromise. 
He has to blame their failures, but he proposes to 
them no scheme of service and defines no one type 
of character. Even for the furtherance of the Gospel 
he sets up no machinery for concerted action. His 
final and unchanging faith is in a fellowship, 
manifesting not man's arrangements but God's 
direct, individual rule, which yet is the only perfect 
harmony. And he knows that harmony is not 
uniformity. Like the spring which has one effect 
in the vine-clad valley and another on the mountain- 
slope, one on the verge of the arctic mists and 
another where shining seas laugh up to sunlit skies, 
yet all contribute to the fullness of the earth and 
show it to be the Lord's, so God's Rule is ever 
varied but ever graciously and freely productive in 
human souls, while making all their work serve 
His eternal and infinite purpose in harmony and 
effectiveness. 

In a fellowship of this order it is mere support 
of one another in error to have one belief, if it do 
not correspond with God's actual purpose: and 



AND THE GOSPEL 273 



even the most perfect sympathy would be vain, if it 
were not in accord with God's rule for realising it. 
But if God's Rule is for the good of His children 
as love measures it and by the power of love as 
wisdom directs it, and if this utterly changes life 
as we must live it and the world as we must use it, 
and if the Gospel is the good-news of it, how is it 
to be forwarded by substituting for it any rule of 
man? Why, indeed, should it be forwarded, unless 
it is equal to the task of ordering all duties and using 
all experiences? If God's guidance and succour is 
life's supreme reality, it must enable men to serve 
all the high ends of the spirit, by a blessed wealth 
of varied loyalties, in many different manifestations, 
while joy and peace turn service into liberty: and 
it cannot be that we commend it by falling back on 
even the best human formulas or the wisest human 
regulations. 

Let us remember that furthering the good-news 
means actually getting people to live in the joy and 
emancipation and freedom of God's own ever present, 
ever active, ever blessed Rule, and that it is not 
furthered at all by merely imposing upon others state- 
ments about it which alter nothing either in themselves 
or their world. Acquiescence is nothing; discovery 
is everything. Pressure is vain ; fear is folly ; anathema 
brutality: for good-news, by its very nature, cannot 
be forced upon the mind, but must sing its way into 
the heart. And why should any other way of furthering 
it ever be thought necessary, if it is good-news of a 

o. s. 18 



274 THE FELLOWSHIP 



Rule of God, as blessed as it is secure; or any embodi- 
ment of it be thought possible except a fellowship of 
its own creating ? 

In our day few of us are borne up by the assurance 
of good-news of a reality which will recreate the 
world by planting an exhaustless joy and victorious 
hope in the hearts of men. With what measure of 
faith could we write to any of the Christian com- 
munities, and more particularly to any of the 
organised Churches, rejoicing in our fellowship in 
the furtherance of this high end? Does any high 
purpose stand steadily before us? Is there so much 
as a sure conviction that high purpose is life's 
meaning? Instead of being able to say that our 
labour is not in vain in the Lord, are we not painfully 
aware that even the best of it, such as the training 
of the young and preaching to the poor, is quite 
distressingly futile for any kind of furthering the 
Gospel ? 

Is it because the Rule of God is not in reality 
what the Gospel proclaims it to be, or only because 
our fellowship, not being really ordered by it, does 
not manifest it? What the world sees is not a great 
joy, springing spontaneously from a reality which, 
being at once a great possession and the means for 
possessing all else according to its divine and eternal 
value, unites us spontaneously in conviction, esteem 
and service. What it does observe is a widespread, 
persistent endeavour to induce every one to repeat 
the same form of words, in the pathetic conviction 



AND THE GOSPEL 275 



that, could it be done with united and emphatic voice, 
speaking in one institution with one creed and one 
order, it could batter a breach for the Gospel through 
every conceivable form of human resistance. And 
what the world is mostly persuaded of as the result 
is that the concern is not about truth, but about 
conventional agreement regarding a dead tradition, 
which a class of stupid people accepts from custom 
and a class of dishonest people maintains from self- 
interest. The only practical outcome is thought to be 
routine religious services and negative, merely re- 
spectable moralities, which challenge none to consider 
or to imitate, and under the influence of which our 
churches become dull clubs, not inspired brother- 
hoods, and our labour for ecclesiastical success, and 
not for a regenerated humanity and a renovated world. 

This may be a total misrepresentation. But, so far 
as furthering the Gospel is concerned, that is not the 
question. The question is whether we have not given 
cause for it by concerning ourselves anxiously about 
the body of our fellowship and failing to show glad 
trust in the creative power of its spirit ? 

Nothing on this earth lives and works as mere 
spirit. Every truth, in particular, must fashion for 
itself a form of outward expression and a vehicle 
of organised activity. But though the soul needs a 
body, the body is nothing except as the expression 
and vehicle of the soul: and that relation of 
dependence we must especially in spiritual things 
maintain. Thus a creed is one thing when it is the 

18—2 



276 THE FELLOWSHIP 



expression of a common faith inspired by individual 
vision of one Divine reality, and quite another when 
it is a mere ecclesiastical formula which people do 
not trouble either to understand or to reject; an 
institution is one thing when it incorporates a spirit 
of brotherhood because each member of it loves his 
brethren in the Father of his Lord, and quite another 
when it is merely the work of ecclesiastical arrange- 
ment and compromise; organisation is one thing 
when it is the natural working of the citizens of 
God's Kingdom united in His service, and it is quite 
another when it is merely ecclesiastical machinery 
whereby a few persons may control the activities of 
the rest. 

The question is whether the enormous concern 
of the Church with this latter kind of creed and insti- 
tution and organisation has not been misdirected 
energy. To neglect it would be, we must admit, to 
neglect much that has in all ages been cultivated with 
zealous diligence. But did not Jesus deliberately and 
conspicuously neglect it, concentrating His whole 
effort on showing the Father ? Having set men face 
to face with this reality, did He not stake everything 
on their response to it? Was not His whole pro- 
gramme for a new world that His disciples should be 
a leaven to change its unrighteousness, salt to banish 
its corruption, light to dispel its darkness, life to 
abolish its death? In short, was not the fellowship 
of the Kingdom for Him the one way of furthering 
its good-news? And if furthering the Gospel means 



AND THE GOSPEL 277 



delivering the souls of men from the power of 
evil, providing them with higher and more blessed 
possessions, transforming their desires and ambitions, 
regenerating their society here and giving them a 
sure hope of one more perfect hereafter, what can 
avail for it except a fellowship already in possession 
of these blessings ? 

Man has many and sore temptations actively to 
commit iniquity. The least of them leads into by- 
ways, miry and perilous and blind. Nevertheless, by 
the worst he may, with effort and loss and pain, 
return and start anew. But there is a temptation 
which has not even this belated and sorrowful promise. 
It is to call a halt where he feels himself tolerably at 
ease and thinks himself tolerably secure. Only as he 
succumbs to it does man renounce his high destiny: 
and the renunciation would be final and irremediable 
were not God's winds forever levelling his tents and 
God's rains forever flooding him out upon higher 
ground. 

How often has the Church given way to this 
temptation, ceasing to strive for a unity in which, 
through the good-news of God in Jesus Christ, each 
one sees the same reality, drinks of the same spirit 
and gladly accepts as his own the same Divine rule, 
and seeking it instead by fixed creed, uniform 
organisation, and even by an ordering of recognised 
duties, all imposed purely from without to conserve 
what seems already won ! 

Endless labour has been spent on thus building, 



278 THE FELLOWSHIP 



on any place at which men had arrived and where 
they proposed to stay, a tower from which to scale 
the battlements of Heaven. Even when confusion 
of tongues fell upon them and divided their efforts, 
they merely blamed other people's forms of speech, 
and did not reflect that it might be God's way of 
forcing them forward into a larger world where 
Heaven might be near without any necessity of 
building up to it, and where, by its guidance, they 
might travel together, in one faith and one loyalty, 
because of the leading of the one God who is Father 
of all, towards nothing less than His infinite and 
eternal purpose. Should we not therein have both 
blessed peace and good-success, did we turn our 
hearts from man's arranging and trust the good- 
news of God Himself in Jesus Christ to order all 
our doings by uniting us in the vision of His one 
truth, in love to His children as we love our common 
Father, and in the service of love in His Kingdom 
of righteousness and peace and joy in His Spirit, 
which is the Spirit of all that, in glorious and varied 
harmony, is true and beautiful and holy? 

Greed still debases our souls, suspicions and 
hatreds still rend our society, and religion still 
sanctions our narrow sympathies with the appearance 
of piety. Under new names we still cherish old dis- 
tinctions little altered. German and English, Catholic 
and Protestant, Nigger and White, are still in 
substance Barbarian and Scythian, Greek and Jew, 
Bond and Free. Is it because the good-news of Jesus 



AND THE GOSPEL 279 



Christ, with His fellowship with the Father and, 
through it, with His children, is an unreality, that 
these things have not in Him ceased to be? Or is 
it only because, as a matter of fact, we have had, even 
in religion, our trust in man's devices, and have not 
yet, in spite of our long, sorrowful experience, learned 
that there can be no utterly reliable news for our state 
except of God, and that we cannot build any better 
society upon a less enduring foundation than a fellow- 
ship which we enter as we live in God's truth, are 
one in His spirit, and serve a kingdom where He 
rules by teaching us that His will is also our own 
hearts' desire ? 



XXI 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 

Luke xi. 9. 'And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, 
and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.' 

Much of our Lord's teaching is very startling 
when we think, and is not questioned only because 
few people think about the familiar. This is specially 
true concerning most of the sayings on prayer. 
What of those enchanter's words which remove 
mountains? What even about this fixed law of 
receiving ? Is it not refuted by the commonest experi- 
ences ? We may have read of marvellous answers to 
petitions, and we may even have known instances. 
Only incredulity, it may be, could believe them acci- 
dental coincidence. But could credulity itself maintain 
that there is any approach in life to a general rule that 
what we ask we invariably receive ? 

By supposing our Lord to mean spiritual need, 
and not every imaginable want, the difficulty is made 
smaller. And this limitation He does seem to set. 
Even if we asked for a stone, He says, thinking it 
bread, God gives bread, not stone; while the final 
promise of the Holy Spirit also speaks of spiritual, 
not of temporal blessings. In the light of both sayings 
we must read the whole discourse. Yet, except that 
there is spiritual profit from any earnest prayer, the 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 281 



answer is no more according to rule in spiritual than 
in temporal concerns. The most unselfish petition 
which ever goes up into the ear of God is the strong 
crying with tears of a mother for her erring son. Yet 
we have seen sons of many prayers perish miserably, 
victims of their own vices. Prayer no more works 
spiritual than physical magic. Moral results are what 
we make them and not what we wish them. In this 
sphere also law operates as much as in the material, 
especially the inexorable law that whatsoever a man 
soweth, that shall he also reap. The most agonising 
supplication, either from the transgressor or from 
his most pious friend, will not avail to prevent the 
calamitous harvest of a sowing of wild oats, or, still 
less, to turn it into the fruitful field of the diligent. 
The prayer neither of penitence nor of compassion will 
speak any wonder-working word to save the sinner 
from the long and arduous and deadly conflict by 
which transgression must be undone and evil habit 
broken. 

This rule of experience, moreover, is a necessity, 
if the Divine government is not to veer, like the 
weather vane, at every breath of human emotion. 
There, in that rule of highest wisdom, lies the real 
difficulty concerning prayer. To the reverent and 
reflecting soul this is a far greater difficulty than 
the mere rigidity of the laws of nature; or, if the 
difficulty is still with natural law, it is not as inflexible 
order but as the rule of a wisdom which cannot 
change. If God is absolutely good and absolutely 



282 THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



wise, if He knows all with absolute knowledge and 
does all with absolute power, where is there place 
in His government for the interference of ignorant, 
erring, foolish mortals? God deals with us as with 
children, and the law which is above every law is 
the law of love. But must not love itself refuse to 
accommodate its wise purposes to our unwise desires ? 
If God's rule is already the wisest and the best, 
must not love, even for our sakes, guard it from 
our foolish interference? 

Yet, if God really deals with us as with children, 
might not a law of prayer itself prove to be part of 
this wisest and best rule? We know what stultified 
pomposity it is in a human parent to think himself 
too wise to be guided by the thoughts, or even the 
desires of his smallest child. But if such superiority 
is folly in man, would it be wisdom in God? May 
not the perfection of His wisdom enable Him to omit 
no purpose of any of His children from the working 
out of His own ? But, in that case, among the laws 
of His acting there must be a law of prayer ; nor could 
the discovery of any other law be more important 
for understanding His government of the world. 

This law our Lord here enunciates. It is no 
sanction of wandering desires or worship of our own 
wills, but just the highest example of the great law 
of sowing and reaping. It sets forth three methods 
of God and three stages of our own prayers : and by 
considering them, we may see, not only how God 
answers prayer, but how no prayer goes unanswered. 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 283 



First, you observe, prayer is spoken of as an 
asking in order to receive. If we ask, we receive 
without condition made or exception admitted. This 
is the first law — The Law of Receiving. 

There are doubtless definite and direct answers 
to prayer; and, if we asked more simply and with 
greater faith, we might all be surer of God's hand 
in the events of our lives. But we have also the 
highest examples to warn us not to expect, in any 
uniform, immediate or visible way, the thing we 
ask. Paul thrice besought the Lord in vain that 
the messenger of Satan to buffet him should depart. 
A still greater than Paul, even He who uttered 
this saying, cried, 4 If it be possible, let this cup 
pass from me': and it did not pass. The Cross was 
the only answer to His prayer. It is the answer 
to many prayers. Perhaps no one rightly prays in 
Christ's name without realising that it may be the 
answer to any prayer. 

Yet we may not say that either asked and was 
denied. Paul's desire to profit by all experiences was 
greater than his desire to choose what any experience 
might be. The Master's wish that God's will should 
be done was far above any wish to be spared any 
agony necessary for the doing of it. When God's 
will was done, for His glory and the good of man, 
Jesus had nothing in His heart but utter submission. 

This distinction between the wish of the moment 
and the unwavering purpose of the life must ever 
be kept in mind. In the outer court of our nature, 



284 THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



where we are influenced by the occasion and make 
use of words, we may utter one prayer; and, in the 
inner sanctuary of our unchanging aspiration, our 
hearts be set on another. If the former is set aside 
for the latter, our true prayer is not unanswered. 
Spoken prayer may be a very superficial asking. 
Prayer, as the hymn says, is 'the soul's sincere 
desire/ Nay, ' sincere ' is superfluous. All desire is 
sincere. Only the utterance of it can be insincere. 
Every longing is a prayer; and our most effectual, 
fervent prayer is our strongest longing. But, if that 
is so, for what have you prayed? For everything, 
base as well as noble, you ever set your heart on. 

If this be the meaning of asking, is our Lord's 
assertion so certainly contradicted by experience? 
Do we not all, in a quite amazing way, receive in 
the line of our desires? Many lives are a mass 
of conflicting desires, which, as they spring from 
mere changing discontent, cannot be satisfied. But, 
if there is one dominating desire in life, how con- 
stantly does life come in the line of it! You think 
of this as the mere effect of concentration, but 
when you seriously consider your life, do you not 
find very little of it exclusively the work of your 
own hands, and most of it sheer gift, which has 
marvellously come in the line of your desires, even 
though the fulfilment of your desire may have been 
far from satisfying you when it came? Is the 
Buddhist saying, that our lives follow our thoughts 
as the wheel the foot of the ox that draws the 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 285 

carriage, much at variance with experience? Does 
not God give to our asking in a way to startle and 
dismay, in a way to drive us to our knees, if only 
we would take thought of what it means, to pray 
God to qualify our desires by the wise purposes of 
His holy will ? 

This ennobling of our petitions is one of the most 
imperative ends of public prayer. In the conscious 
presence of God and in the fellowship of our brethren, 
even the prayer for daily bread may rise into a higher 
region of gratitude and of regard for the wants of 
others ; intercession become a sense of common service 
and of the impossibility of selfish good; and, finally, 
with the perfect spirit of common worship, all other 
things we could desire be subjected to the search for 
the Kingdom of God and its righteousness. 

But if the sanctuary is the place of better petitions, 
the closet of our hearts, when the door is shut upon 
our secret thoughts, is the place of surest answers. 
From thence the prayers go up continuously, con- 
cerning which it is amazingly, startlingly, even ap- 
pallingly true, that whatsoever we ask we receive. 

And, beyond this life, is eternity with the answers 
which still await our longing. Our highest aspira- 
tions alone may be its promise, but none of our 
desires may be wholly unanswered. 

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist. 

And though the good only may be everlasting, may 
not the evil also have a kind of immortality? To 



286 THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



employ a figure used in another connection: 'as 
the fins of a fish foreshadow that water exists, or the 
wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air,' so 
every longing of the heart foreshadows some kind 
of realisation. That is a universal law: and it is the 
laws of the spirit, and not of the body, which endure. 

Strange mystery of the soul of man made in the 
image of God, strange power of his asking, strange 
intimacy with the working of the Eternal ! To what- 
soever we ask the answer is so sure that for it we 
need have no concern. Our one need is to be taught 
to ask truly in Christ's name, so that all our desires 
may be wholly according to the Father's love and the 
Father's wisdom. 

But, if we receive what we ask, we do not receive 
it at our own time and in our own way. Yet it is 
not the whole truth, when we say, it is at God's 
time and in His way. That is not adequate, because 
it is not His mere pleasure which determines either 
His giving or His withholding. The law of receiving 
is suspended only by a higher law — The Law of 
Finding. 

Suppose you were a collector of rare plants. To 
have one given you might be a very great pleasure, 
but would it afford you the same satisfaction or be 
your very own, as if you had found it for yourself? 

The people whose soil and climate present them 
freely with food and warmth are not, in the end, so 
richly endowed as those who raise their bread from 
the clayey furrow and build their shelter under the 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 287 



biting wind. These blessings are not less, but more 
beneficently given, because they do not say, 'Here 
we are, put forth your hand and receive/ but, 
'We shall be here, when you dig for us and find.* 
And just as little do God's spiritual gifts become 
less free, or less gracious, or less abundant, or less 
sure when they cease to say, ' Receive, ' and begin to 
say, 'Find.' 

Of nothing is this truer than the truth itself. 
God, we too readily assume, must speak and man 
simply receive. But it is not so now, and never has 
been. God is wiser, more patient, and, above all, 
more magnanimous. ' It is/ one of the Proverbs says, 
'the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honour 
of kings is to search out a matter/ To give this regal 
glory, God conceals. He would lift us up and crown 
us, in the glory of His own discernment, over all His 
works. Hence no word of His says from the skies, 
'Hear and believe.' His revelation comes through 
human experience, through the souls that have sought 
and found : and it is revelation to us also as we are of 
their kindred and are willing to seek that we too may 
find. 

Nor is the supreme revelation, the Word of God 
Himself, an exception. Even His sayings and doings 
are valueless, till, by seeking, we find them for our- 
selves anew. His truth may be the most familiar 
thing in life, yet have no real existence for us, even 
as a man might plough all his days with the gold 
shining in the furrow, yet die in poverty. Christ's 



288 THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



demand still is, 'Seek and ye shall find'; and those 
He never fails are the seekers after God. The same 
is true of every gift He has to give. Never to cease 
to hunger and thirst after righteousness is never to 
fail. Even should sin prevail and vice enslave, to 
know our poverty and to continue to seek is to find 
God, and, with Him, the unsearchable riches. 

In God's eyes we are rather what we seek than 
what we have attained. What men take us to be is 
often mere effect of custom, training and good in- 
fluences. Only what we seek shows what in our own 
hearts we are, and prophesies what, in the end, we 
shall be. Wherefore, even more than what we ask, it 
is the wings of the eagle in the egg. Even in time, 
the best of life is finding what we seek; and, in the 
day when our real spiritual world disentangles itself 
from the fashions and shadows of time, we shall find 
the rest. There need be no uncertainty about finding. 
The one fear is that the thing we have been seeking 
may prove ashes for bread, wormwood for wine, 
corruption for life, darkness for light. 

This Law of Finding, however, is limited by a 
still higher law, which is The Law of Discovering. 

'Knock and it shall be opened unto you.' 

This is the law which requires the long delays 
to which we are all subjected and by which so 
many are discouraged. For many weary years we 
may stand faced by doors which never open to our 
knocking. If we have accepted no denial, if delay 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 289 



has only enlarged our measure of blessings beyond 
our present knowing and increased our urgency, 
then we have most truly 'waited upon God. Such 
persistent knocking at the door of life's mystery is the 
deepest, the best attested, the most efficacious utter- 
ance of the heart, the only form of prayer wholly 
adequate to God's infinite and eternal purpose with 
the souls of men. 

To knock that it may be opened unto us is more 
than to receive what we know we desire, and more 
than to find what we know we are seeking. It is 
the awaiting of a discovery of truth and beauty and 
goodness beyond all our knowing. Yet it is not 
a mere expectation of lighting upon, by accident, 
something wholly unanticipated and strange. Like 
all discovery, it is at once beyond our asking or 
our seeking yet the receiving of our heart's desire, 
the finding of what we have ever pursued. It is 
the unexpected, yet the realisation of our expecta- 
tion; the strange, yet with nothing stranger in it 
than its familiarity. The barrier falls and blank 
obstruction gives way to radiant vistas, but we are 
still standing on the old path, and somehow it is 
still just the road we expected to travel. 

When Kepler, after years of study, discovered 
the true orbit of the planets, it was a new revelation 
to lift up his heart in wonder and adoration, but, 
while it had the marvel of the unexpected, had it 
the strangeness of the unanticipated ? Rather would 
it appear merely simple and beautiful and right, 



2 9 o THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



the natural order of his disordered ideas, the per- 
fection he had ever followed, so fitting as to leave 
him amazed at ever having thought that God's way 
of working was different. 

When, after effecting with long and vain en- 
deavour only prose and dullness, the poet's 'thoughts 
in harmonious numbers move,' and the expression 
one with the thought rises like a perfect star on his 
horizon, is it not, though undreamt of, simply the 
realisation of all he had dreamed? 

All our best possessions come to us as such dis- 
coveries. We follow a flutter of white raiment, and 
are suddenly confronted by the face of our guardian 
angel. Or in the figure of our text, after long weary 
years of knocking, the door, which blankly closed 
our vista, suddenly opens, and we are filled with 
the sense of wonder, yet not of strangeness, for, 
while it is utterly different from all we pictured, it 
is wholly the fulfilment of what we have loved 
without knowing how to desire or pursue. Thus it 
is with the truth which sets us free, the pardon which 
gives us peace, the grace which sustains our wills, 
the faith which encourages our hearts. 

It is summed up in the greatest of all things, which 
is love. But love is not content merely to satisfy us, 
or to see us attaining merely what we know to pursue. 
It would make us worthy of nobler satisfaction, and 
would open for us doors into experiences undreamt 
of, which are yet the only perfect realisation of all 
our aspiration and all our endeavour. God, being love, 



THE LAWS OF PRAYER 291 

has in store for us what eye has not seen, nor ear 
heard, nor the heart of man conceived ; and we wait 
on His purpose as we keep knocking at the door of 
life's mysteries and unrealised possibilities. 

All our days God is opening doors for those of us 
who continue knocking, but the blankest one at the 
end is also the widest. When it opens, it will be 
in the largest sense upon what it has not entered 
into our heart to conceive. Yet may there not be, in 
a still deeper sense, nothing new? Shall we not find 
ourselves still on the old road, with nothing altered 
except the opening of the gates which obstructed our 
vision? Life will stretch before us with a vast and 
hitherto unrealised meaning, but will it not also be 
just the old life, with its meaning the fulfilment of 
life's foreshadowings and its blessings the natural 
satisfaction of our gropings? 

We shall then know that our greatest, truest, most 
efficacious prayers were neither our petitions for what 
we thought we needed, nor our reaching out after 
what we thought our goal, but what the Apostle calls 
the groanings that cannot be uttered, the ceaseless 
unrest for what was, in this world, ever beyond our 
knowing. 

God keeps us waiting and dissatisfied and un- 
blessed, not because He would not gladly satisfy 
our desire and reward our seeking, but because His 
is a larger love which would give us a still higher 
possession on the better title of our own discovery. 
In that confidence let us pray — asking, seeking, 



292 THE LAWS OF PRAYER 



knocking — knowing the blankest door of His 
seeming denial to be only the barrier that will open 
upon His fullest manifestation. So shall we pray, 
not only when we worship together in the sanctuary 
or kneel at our private devotions, but by a whole 
life of trust, of dependence, of thanksgiving, and, 
above all, of waiting at the door of life's mystery, 
which is life's prophecy and hope. 



CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 •) 1 Thomson ParicDrive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



